


Seed The Future

by Rhinocio



Series: Now We're Gonna Grow [1]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Demisexual Duck, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-07 14:30:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21459589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhinocio/pseuds/Rhinocio
Summary: Duck Newton has spent his entire life fighting against the strong-arm of fate. He’s finally fulfilled the task he was Chosen for, and now he’s free to embrace the easy, boring routine he always wanted. But Minerva wasn’t part of his post-credit daydreams, and he can’t seem to step away from the unsteady friendship they’re building in the aftermath. Her company digs into the fond parts of his heart with all the determination of a seed taking root in fresh earth.As someone who works in a forest, Duck probably should have realized that things grow where they’re planted.
Relationships: Aubrey Little & Duck Newton, Juno Divine & Duck Newton, Minerva/Duck Newton
Series: Now We're Gonna Grow [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1640548
Comments: 179
Kudos: 218





	1. Choose

**Author's Note:**

> This wasn't the TAZ fic I'd planned on completing, but the ship tag is barren and I only just finished Amnesty, which made for peak motivation. We're gonna be riding a once-per-week posting schedule, as the story is already written (and taps out at almost 30k words). Please feel free and encouraged to leave comments and/or critiques!

It’s a newspaper that sets thing off.

Duck’s parked the Forestry Service truck he’s borrowed to patrol the far eastern section of the Monongahela. He's flipping through his clipboard of daily checks and sipping at some lukewarm coffee from a thermal mug when a rolled up photo on the newspaper someone left in the cupholder catches his eye. He unspools the article in his lap and gets himself lost in the headline piece about the deforestation of the Amazon. Constant attacks by international logging companies have put protection back into the mind of the public, and conservation groups are popping up to rebuild what the deforestation is taking out, or so the article says. Some vague memory of rainforest preservation efforts in the 80s sparks in the back of his brain, long since brushed by in favour of bigger climate problems, and his heart sinks to see that very little has changed in forty years. Duck sighs into his drink, folds the image of burning trees down, and tucks the newspaper away into the glove box. He focuses on the tall conifers outside his truck instead, and the job he already has protecting them.

Curiousity happens to be a hell of a beast, though, and before too long Duck finds his fidgeting fingers reaching for the aged remote that powers the small television in the corner cupboard of the ranger station. It’s a quiet day in the park; tourist season is at a low, and all the research crews keeping track of animal populations have already packed in. Duck is staffing the place alone today, at least until Arnold shows up to take over his shift in the evening. Well, and without counting the rangers situated on the other side of the enormous sprawl of the forest. 

Which is to say that Duck doesn’t have much better to do than waste away an afternoon flipping through news channels and getting sucked into tales of what’s going on half a world away from him. He catches himself scribbling notes on the subject in the margins of the Sudoku page he’s started in the communal puzzle book, and slaps the cover shut before the idea of another quest can lodge itself any more firmly in his brain.

The day is long and dull, and evening sets in with a slow inevitability. Duck gathers up his windbreaker and hat, runs through the chores for shutting down the camp with bare attention, and closes up shop with a solid, echoing click of the lock. The air outside is cool for the time of year, and skateboarding out of the Monongahela proves chillier than anticipated. Monotony is the only ghost that follows Duck home, though the rainforests keep poking at the back of his brain like repeated sparks of flint against green kindling.

He makes a split decision at the fork in the road when he exits the park to take the route away from his quiet apartment complex in favour of the winding trail up to Amnesty Lodge. 

A truck comes rumbling up behind him during the last hilly leg of the path. The crunch of tires on gravel is a fair warning that it’s there, but Duck jumps when the horn honks playfully; it’s a familiar face that swings the vehicle up beside him. Mama gestures a thumb back in invitation, and Duck’s grateful butt gets a tow up the rest of the way. 

The Lodge is as quiet as the forest, its energy muffled by the weather and the lack of tourists. As Duck shrugs off his coat into a hanging pile of various snowgear, several Sylvans greet him with hugs and small talk. There’s a warm fire crackling in the great room, and more familiar faces wave at him from around it; Jake clambers over the couches to bother him about snow conditions at the higher altitudes of the Park, and Hollis flaps a lazy hand at him from the loveseat, one foot in a cast and the shape of their body barely discernible under a heap of blankets. 

“Here for a reason, Duck?” Mama asks, in that gentle deadpan way she does when she’s hoping for the best but expecting the worst. A lifetime of fighting monsters and fronting obligation will do that to you – Duck is more than familiar with the experience. He whittles a smile onto his stiff face and shakes his head. 

“Just sayin’ hi,” he assures her, and immediately has to ask, “Heard from Aubrey?”

It’s practically protocol to check, at this point, but with communications as they are it’s rare he gets more than a simple, “She’s doin’ fine,” once a month or so. Though a fair few friends have been trying to figure out how to link Sylvain and Earth once more, the sad fact is that neither planet has the technology Reconciliation did, and have had to make do with occasional psychic check-ins from Thacker. At last contact, Aubrey and her cohort had just left Chicane and were wandering the countryside. Duck settles the worrying part of his heart by reminding himself that the planet is much less dangerous now, and that Aubrey’s harbouring the spirit of a goddess to keep her safe, but the lack of detail irks him still.

There’s something warm and wonderful about the Lodge that Duck finds himself forgetting on a regular basis, but is struck by every time he stops in again – the place is peaceful, and familiar, and feels something like a childhood home, worn in all the right places but not quite his anymore. He says a few more hellos and then wanders his way towards the fireplace, gratefully taking a blanket Jake conjures out of Hollis’ horde, ready to just… settle. Take a nap. Enjoy the kind of white noise that only other bodies can provide. For as much as Duck has always been fond of the soft rustling and creaks of a forest to keep him company, he’s grown accustomed to the sound of people nearby, talking and moving and disturbing the room in the way only living things can. He used to think having a cat negated the need for roommates, but he’s missed the chaos that a packed home brought since the dust of destiny settled.

He scrunches down into a high-backed chair with the blanket wrapped firmly around his shoulders, hat shucked off and hair ruffled, and finds his fingers reaching for a duplicate of the newspaper in his truck. The article about the rainforest peeks at him from around the rest, its page shuffled out into the air by someone’s haphazard folding. Duck groans under his breath, sure this is some kind of new way his brain’s trying to prophesize things at him.

“Wayne Newton!” is the singular shout of warning he gets in the quiet of the room before a large dark palm is cupping his arm, squeezing in delight. Duck groans and rubs a hand over his face as his heart settles its startled pounding; Hollis snorts at his reaction from the other side of the room. 

“Hey, Minerva,” he sighs, bracing himself as she wiggles between the table and next nearest couch and folds up on it with all the barely-contained energy of a border collie. Her bright eyes are fixated on him, and Minerva leans forward over where her hands are perched on the chair arm. 

She’s been staying at the Lodge since they returned to Earth. Duck hadn’t wanted her sitting around alone in his apartment when he was away, and she was loathe to throw off his long-established routine by following him to work. The Sylphs have been good to her, by all accounts – Minerva’s taken a liking to the springs, and to the patient (if chaotic) lessons in snowboarding the kids on the other couch have been giving her. She’s been an asset in the kitchen with both lifting in bulk deliveries and chopping the hard winter squash Barclay’s been working into the recent meals. Moira’s since given up on teaching Minerva how to play the piano, but Duck’s caught them singing together on more than one occasion.

But for all the attentions and affections the Lodge crew have given to Minerva, she remains exceptionally interested in Duck. He knows she’s been backing out of his life as best she can, by moving here and ceasing the three minute astral conversations they used to have every day. The invites to practice swordwork with Leo and Sarah have likewise fallen by the wayside. She no longer meets him right at the door of the Lodge like a decorative statue, and even avoids greeting him until everyone else has had their say. All in all Duck’s glad for her, happy that she’s found other things to occupy her time besides training him for an obscure destiny, but he can’t help noticing the strange fissure between them even with all the effort she’s clearly putting in to making sure he’s okay. 

“Have you encountered anything new in the woods, Wayne Newton?” she asks, watching his face carefully for his reaction, and Duck can’t help the smile that twitches one side of his lips. “Have any challenges arisen in your protection of the forest?”

“Nah, same– same shit, different day.”

“Your day was unpleasant?”

“It’s an expression. Hey, you, uh– how’s things been here? You still shredding the slopes with Jake?”

“I have mastered the Pizza Formation on skis! The snow is not yet firm enough for good snowboard ‘shred’, or so I have been told, but Jake Coolice has promised he will teach me a multitude of–” she glances at the Sylph in question, who flicks her a grin and thumbs up from under Hollis’ legs. “ –of ‘sick flips’ as soon as the weather cooperates.”

“Yeah,” Duck chuckles, “That’d be something to see.”

They’re fumbling, the both of them. A strange vacuum has developed where once they would have talked about training or planning, where once Minerva’s long, vague history of warfare and combat would have coincided with the stress of Pine Guard-ing. They’ve fallen into a strange valley of conversational lulls, as if speaking about any other topic oversteps some undefined boundary. Duck’s laid awake more than once mulling over the change, wondering if it’s something he did or a result of the drastic shift both their lives have gone through. 

Minerva looks over him slowly, something almost calculated in her eyes, as if she’s detailing the shape of his face and the slouch of his shoulders and his overgrown hair to memory, and Duck’s ears start to burn at the strange analysis. She follows the curve of his arm to where the newspaper is folded in his grip, and reaches to take it. Her fingers brush over his, and they’re the deep shade of a frozen lake under the faintest silver moon, a black that makes the blotchy fairness of his own hand all the more obvious. The paper crinkles under his discomfited grip.

“The trees are burning,” Minerva says, her head tilting to better see the image before he relinquishes the newspaper to her. “This is not in your Monongahela National Forest, is it?”

“In a place called the Amazon,” he corrects, tucking his arm away. “Nowhere near here.” 

Minerva sits back in her seat, her eyebrows drawn down as she studies the picture, frowning at it as if the words on the page are a personal insult. She hasn’t yet learned how to read English, but scours the article anyway, her lips pressed into a displeased line as it fails to offer her answers. She’s no stranger to disaster, and a problem-solver at heart; the flickering gaze she draws across the newspaper is clearly searching for a way to combat the situation, as unrelated to her as it is.

And Duck understands the sentiment, because he’s been unable to put away the imagery since he first spotted it. The idea of entire swaths of habitat being burnt and cut away are disturbing the Chosen Warrior persona he’s long since buried under layers of grief and exhaustion. The echoing news reports from the outdated television bite at his eardrums like the teeth of starving piranhas, hungry for his interest. Duck runs a finger over the knit seam of his blanket as he watches Minerva’s distress, and something deep inside him – something that defaults to her guidance, maybe – hijacks his tongue and has him muttering.

“They’ve got, uh, relief efforts set up down there. Couple different organizations doing– fixing stuff up, replanting the trees. Lawyers trying to stop it. Reforestation’s a bitch, y’know, and I bet they– I mean, I don’t think volunteers would even know what they were doing, so you’ve gotta hope they have actual foresters on hand, or– people who know something about how the ecosystem works. I’d like to show–”

Minerva looks up at him, and he freezes, the words knotting up on his tongue in an embarrassed tangle. His mouth snaps closed, and a heat crawls up his neck as he realizes what he sounds like. Duck isn’t a thrillseeker, and he’s had his fantastical unwanted adventure. He’s been to space and to another planet, fought countless monstrosities and fulfilled a lifelong prophesy to rid himself of the universe’s most annoying sword. He’s fought his entire life for the simplicity of a day job as a park ranger and evenings where he could just relax and watch TV, and here he is daydreaming about flying to another country and playing Captain Planet.

“You are an expert in forests, are you not, Wayne Newton?”

“I know some things about trees, Minnie, yeah,” he sighs, running a hand through his hair and tilting his head to stare at the fireplace. The logs in the fire crackle at him, and lines of simmering embers along them pulse with colour as they slowly turn to charcoal. He can only imagine the same sort of devastation scarring an entire landscape, and the thought churns his stomach. Duck’s been walking the trails of the Monongahela for almost thirty years, and all of its majesty could be stripped by fire and saws in so little time – he wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to be the attack front of a restoration project in his own home town. 

“A situation this great would welcome your knowledge.”

“It’s not about– I’m sure they’d do just fine with someone else,” he says, firmly avoiding the stare he knows Minerva has pointed his way; he can already picture the proud, straight-backed posture and grin that led to him being bullied into grand cosmic schemes. He knows he’s revealed his hand by expressing interest, and damage control on the conversation feels near impossible. Duck itches to run back to the door for his coat and flee into the night. He’s near-whispering now, muffled by embarrassment. “It’s a fuckin’ pipe dream. I’m not gonna go however many thousands of miles away when– look, I’ve got a job here, and– and a cat, and I’m sure somebody’s gonna figure out the gate any day now, and Aubrey would kick my ass if I wasn’t here when she came through, so–”

“Wayne,” Minerva says softly, and when he turns back it’s not a fight he finds, but something far more tender. The newspaper is clutched tightly in one of her hands, and the other is reaching for his, suspended in the air between them. An understanding smile turns up the corners of her full lips, tinged with some kind of sadness. “The effort will be delighted to have you. Who must you contact to join them?”

He doesn’t know, right off the cuff. He doesn’t even know where to start. Internet access is limited in Kepler to begin with, so it’s an evening spent down at the Cryptonomica on a wheezing old laptop that he has to do before he has any solid answers. Minerva’s standing at the fork in the road expectantly when he wheels down from work a day later, and easily jogs beside him as he boards his way towards the shop. 

Duck keeps waiting for the moment her interest turns obligatory, for the conversations between them to become peppered with talk of greater purposes and heroism. But she seems content to sit silently nearby and offer shoves of non-negotiable encouragement when Duck tries to back away from progress. Before the week is out he’s taking paperwork to the ranger station and explaining the time off he wants to take to Juno, whose teasing turns to genuine interest the longer he talks. She seems to realize that for all the ridiculousness of the idea, Duck is serious about helping the rainforest, and going to actually follow through on his plan to do so.

The letter confirming his volunteer status arrives just as the calendar flips into springtime, and Duck stands on the porch of his apartment re-reading it so many times that his fingers go numb. He isn’t sure what to do with himself, shocked with the realization that his life is about to change. He’ll tell Juno in the morning, and maybe Leo will take care of his cat for him while he’s gone. He’ll get someone at the Lodge to keep him informed about what’s going on in Kepler, so he’ll know when they finally find a way to bridge to Sylvain. With his new-ish astral-whatever powers, he’s got the ability to keep in touch with any of the other Chosen, so maybe Minerva…?

Duck doesn’t know what to say to Minerva. 

He lets the thought of confrontation stew in his brain, and decides he’ll wait for a good time and a good series of words to present to her. Duck isn’t sure why the idea of leaving bothers him so much – Minerva has friends here in Kepler, and a life she’s slowly building for herself, and now that she’s on Earth and Reconciliation has been destroyed, she’s as free from duty as he is. With a genocide and a lost civilization hovering over her head, the least she ought to have is a break from dealing with is her uncooperative former student. 

Duck kicks his shoes off at the door and throws his coat onto the sofa, letter still in hand. He knows that if he lets things sit he’ll forget to fill something in or the fear of failure will get the better of him again. Seed The Future, the organization he signed up with, needs a large variety of identity-confirming documents from him, so he heads immediately for the junk drawer in his closet. It’s a steel filing cabinet he took from the trash when the ranger station was renovated, and where he keeps his passport and other important shit. He sorts through years’ worth of useless bills and a couple of postcards from Jane, and finds a handful of rubber bands, a screwdriver, and several tacks he stabs his fingers on. He discovers an ancient lost sock that’s fused with a dustbunny behind the cabinet when he drops an envelope and goes fishing for it. Duck folds up on the floor of the walk-in closet like a toddler at storytime, sifting papers into trash piles and immediately losing track of which pile is meant for what. 

It’s probably a good thing Minerva’s staying in Kepler, he muses, since she’s more of an undocumented immigrant than even the once-exiled Sylvans. The town is a safe haven for her, given that the locals are now mostly informed about (or had already believed in) otherworldly beings; nobody’s given Minerva a hard time, though she’s gotten plenty of double-takes. She’s an imposing figure already, but then there are the pointed ears, and the swirling blue tattoos that stand out like neon on her dark skin – Duck’s pretty sure Earth tattoos aren’t made that vivid.

The culture shock would be another thing. Duck’s not confident in his language skills, but he did some Spanish in high school, and he’s got more of a grip on human customs – even foreign ones – than Minerva. Socializing with the Amnesty Lodge crew over the past few months has certainly helped her blend in better; she doesn’t shout every sentence now, and her slang and understanding of idioms is improving every day. But she’s still indisputably _alien_, and has enough of a task in adapting to life in Kepler. Duck isn’t selfish enough to throw her into an entirely new world just for– for–

For what, exactly? Company? He shoves a wad of tax returns back into the drawer and grumbles at himself for his selfishness, acting like Minerva is part and parcel of his choices just because she’s haunted him for twenty-odd years. Duck can admit he’s gotten used to having her nearby and knowing that any long bout of silence would soon be interrupted with her boisterous exclamations, but she doesn’t owe him that attention anymore, and he’s certainly had his fill.

He’s gotten lost wondering whether he’ll still be able to contact Minerva through that whole psychic link thing she set him up with (and promptly berating himself for his stupidity, because it worked across lightyears of space, of course it’ll work from here to Brazil) when he swears he can hear her call his name.

Duck looks towards the door of his bedroom, stilling his hands, and reflexively calls, “Yeah?”

The “Wayne Newton?” that responds doesn’t echo down the hall, but from his blind side. Duck whirls to look over the opposite shoulder. Minerva appears to be lounging across the milk cartons of clothing and boots he’s shoved into a far corner of his small closet, her long legs reaching out into the carpet of his bedroom. Her arms are folded in front of her, and phasing slightly through the wire shelves on the side wall. She’s not there physically, but as a spectre of light, like she’s been summoned from his memories and repeating the regular act. 

“Is something wrong?” she asks.

“Uh… no?” He takes a look around the embarrassing state of his closet, eyeing the sprawling shrapnel of a hundred receipts that were fished out of pockets and never made it to the trash. Several work boots full of holes and caked with dried mud are piled up in the corner. There are sweaters hanging up somewhere in the mass of clothes around him that he’s had for at least a decade, and Minerva would probably recognise them. He fights down a squirm by remembering that these astral projections don’t take objects or environments into account. “Did you, uh, need something?”

The ghostly eyes watching him scrunch up as Minerva smiles, and her head folds back down upon her arms. Her small laugh rings through every cell of his body and sets his hair on end. 

“You called me, Duck,” she says, “Was that not intentional?” 

Duck runs a hand through his hair, caught by the truth and unwilling to embarrass himself with an inevitably-botched lie. Minerva evidently realizes this too, and her grin grows brighter even as she stretches out, looking as pleased as a cat in a patch of sunlight. Duck’s always seen her astral form on its feet and ready to bounce, as wildly expressive and as full of energy as Aubrey after a caffeinated drink, so there’s something strangely intimate about the way she’s lounging in front of him, the shape of her muscular body distracting even as featureless as it is. 

“I have never accidentally reached out to any Chosen,” Minerva smiles, and Duck sighs at the realization that she’s mocking him. “I have had much more practice, though. And I am not unhappy to see you.”

Duck sidesteps the reflexive ‘ditto’ with a question: “What’re you doing?”

“I am ‘chilling’ in the hot springs. The heat of the water helps soothe my muscles after a long run. I cannot say I am a fan of the sulfuric smell, however.” Her feet swish lazily behind her, and the white blanks of her eyes disappear as she closes them, her jaw nestling into the fold of her arms. Duck makes the mistake of thinking he can small talk his way into shutting down their interaction just a second before Minerva asks, “Have you heard any news concerning your enlistment to the saving of the burning trees?”

“No, I–” he starts, glancing around for the acceptance letter and quickly covering it with a palm. Sweat builds on the back of his neck as he fumbles for a workaround to telling her immediately. He had wanted to approach this carefully, to tell Minerva in a way that didn’t sound like abandonment and a final brushoff after two decades of avoidance. She’s a lot to handle, but she’s familiar, and a friend, and there’s no easy phrase that makes Duck chasing a dream not sound like a backhanded slap to every pitch of destiny and heroism Minerva’s ever offered him. “They were gonna send a… an email… toooo my– uh, my old– they sent it to the wrong email address, y’know, like, everybody’s got that one junk account that gets all the spam. And I tried to, like, call them about it, but they don’t have a– phone…”

Minerva stares at him, still as a statue made of moonlight.

“Fuck, alright, no, I got– I got a letter. They’re, uh, they want me to start in May,” he sighs, lifting and unfolding the paper to read over the specifics with unfocused eyes. He can feel Minerva watching him like she’s latched into his nervous system, her presence tingling at his side like a warm breath against his neck. Pride and discomfort blend inside of his stomach like the worst possible soup. After barely scraping through high school, Duck’s enlistment with the parks service had been met with relieved indifference; Duck would happily take that kind of dismissal over the gross feelings of betrayal this letter is leaving him with.

“That is wonderful news, Wayne Newton!” says Minerva, and he has to look at her again to believe the bright tone and broad grin. She’s sat up in her excitement, and scooted closer to the side of the invisible pool, the picture of attentiveness. “Tell me, what must you study before you depart? You must train your body for the trials of physical endurance that smothering forest fires will demand, I imagine.”

“Is that you offering?” he snorts, relief rushing along with the breath and painting it fond. Minerva mimics the sound, and there’s something almost coy about the shrug she gives him. Duck is struck, suddenly, at how much he misses seeing the minute details of her expressions, something these astral forms had never allowed her. The momentary ache grows into a gnawing hunger as he realizes he’ll be going longer without it from the springtime on, and he suddenly needs to know: “Hey, are you– you’re happy, yeah? In general. Like, you– you’re happy?”

Minerva seems startled by his question, and the long silence that follows it is so unnatural for her he figures he must have broken the psychic link somehow. 

“Duck Newton,” she says, gentle and short, “I am content.”

Duck sits for a long time on the floor of his closet after she fades away, fidgeting through the paperwork and feeling strangely like he’s done something wrong. His cat comes searching for him, mewing quietly, and he uses the sound as a rope to pull himself back out of the sea of thought. He stuffs the mess back into its steel coffin and rises on achy knees. The useful records he’s found get piled on the kitchen table with a pen set on top as a reminder, and then Duck wanders into the hallway, still in his uniform, to bug Leo about petsitting. It feels like he’s passed the hardest test of commitment, and now it’s just a matter of checking things off the to do list.

He pauses with his knuckles just above the door, struck by the sound of Leo speaking. The melodic drift of his thick accent is met with the murmur of Duck’s name by another voice, spoken in full.

Duck turns back on his heel, stuffs his hands in his pockets, and decides he’ll bug his friend and fellow Chosen about the cat some other time. He’s got paperwork to do.

It isn’t simple paperwork, of course – the American volunteer organization needs him to have an international work permit, and the forms for that seem to want every detail of his life from birth on. Duck gives up halfway to make a frozen dinner and watch television, and then brings it to work with him the next day. He’s folded over himself on a desk at the one of the many entrance stations to the Monongahela when another ranger comes clomping into the place with determined strides, and two hands whack down on the table on either side of him.

“Hope you’ve got those forms done right, Newton, or you’re gonna be answering to me,” Juno says, all playful ferocity, and it’s a long moment of raised-eyebrow staring Duck gives her before he starts to realize what she’s saying. The initial emails he’d sent off to the rainforest restoration program had been met with glowing excitement at his experience in the parks service, and had urged him to ask around within the ranger community for other interested parties. Juno had been the main listening ear to Duck’s woes over applying in the first place, and he’d caught her watching the news reports on the rainforest situation nearly as frequently as he had. She grins as his eyes grow wide, guess on his tongue, and says, “I’m heading down in April to get things set up.”

“What the fuck, Juno,” he says, but her laugh suggests she hears the joy under his exasperated tone. “Here I am trying to get the hell away from your tyrannical rule, and you’re following me?”

“Technically you’re following me, Duck. You’re doing grunt work, but they want me at the top of the heap. Turns out having a couple of fancy awards to your name gets you attention.” She sits herself on top of the desk, looking beyond delighted at the idea of a new experience; there’s a crisp black sketchbook peeking out of her messenger bag when she dumps it on the desk next to Duck’s arm. “Thanks for hooking me up.”

“Put a good word in for me,” he snorts, shuffling to the side as he starts at his paperwork again.

“Using your connections right off the bat, huh? I’m gonna have to write you up for that, Duck. Citation City from here on out.” She laughs, but frowns just as quickly. “Hope I don’t have to write that shit in Portuguese.”

“It’s an American-based company,” Duck shrugs, before realizing, “Wait,_ Portuguese?_”

Juno bends over laughing at him. It’s one of many things she chuckles over as they discuss where they’ll be spending the next year or so of their lives, and Duck finds himself just as delighted with the conversation. It’s exciting to have someone to relate to and talk specifics with, and he’s comforted to find out he isn’t going to be flying solo. Duck’s been a bit of a lone wolf for most of his life, and the actual forestry part of the volunteer work doesn’t worry him for that reason. But there’s an indisputable nightmare of a social situation involved – he’ll be camping alongside strangers for a large chunk of his volunteer hours, and they'll be looking to him for guidance. Now he’ll have one familiar face onsite to begin with, and someone to defer to. Juno reminds him of things to pack and memos to make, and promises to bring him books on the country; she jokes that the next workday they’ll talk entirely in Portuguese over the comms, just so he has some kind of practice. 

Duck leaves the Monongahela National Forest for once with a light heart and bounce in his step, and if he does a couple of kickflips as he skids down the hills towards home like he’s a teenager again, then nobody has to be the wiser. The world looks a little more colourful outside the simmering anxiety in the back of his head, and he’s excited.

The excitement morphs into a comforting little nugget of optimism over the calendar countdown, one that reminds him to pick up toiletries and snacks when he swings into town for groceries and sends him digging for long-forgotten warm weather clothes in the back of his closet. He spends evenings hunched over his documentation at the dinner table making sure everything’s in order. He meets Mama at the local diner one day in passing, and they sit around chatting about the coming adventure; several of the other patrons get involved in the discussion, having known Duck since he was a punk kid, and they’re amused at the idea of him saving the rainforest. 

They’d never imagined him as a hero, they laugh, and a twinging little guilt in Duck’s chest has to agree.

He’s three weeks out from his longhaul flight to South America when he shuts down the ranger station for the night and finds Minerva waiting outside, restlessly leaning from foot to foot. There’s a touque pulled down over her bald head, and only the tips of the tattoos between her eyebrows are showing under the knit. Her hands are folded in front of her and fidgeting, and she startles as Duck yanks the door closed behind him and rattles the key into the lock to seal it.

“Hey, Minerva,” he says, as casually as anything, because she’s been showing up in unexpected places for the vast majority of his life. 

“Hello, Duck Newton,” she replies immediately, her greeting almost blurted right over his, and he turns to look at her curiously. There’s a stiffness to her shoulders as he clomps down the wooden stairs and zips up his coat, and she seems to be holding her breath. They’ve barely spoken since their astral conversation in the closet, and Duck isn’t keen to spend a year away from her with a disconcerting quasi-argument left in his wake. He reaches out and pats her arm in an impulse gesture of comfort.

Whatever mask Minerva was holding over her emotion drops at the contact, and without room for a breath she clenches her hands and says, “Duck Newton, I have spoken to Ranger Juno Divine and requested she assist me in joining the effort to save the burning trees. I have watched the news programs every night at the Amnesty Lodge and have found myself appalled by the destruction. I have very little knowledge of the plant life of the Earth, but I wish to help, Duck Newton, and I am here because I would– I am asking your permission to join the quest.”

She seems to grow more frantic in the long pause that Duck’s processing takes. Her chest heaves like she’s been running, and the bright neon colours of her borrowed ski jacket highlight the movement all the more. The nervousness that’s been long building up in the back of Duck’s mind falls apart like a cracked glacier, rumbling down into the sea of no cares and leaving a pristine relief in its wake. 

“Sorry,” he says slowly, thoughts composing like poured molasses, “Why?”

“Because this is–” Minerva bristles, flustered, and her gestures grow bold and wild again as she tries to express her worries. “Duck Newton, I have been by your side for the entirety of our mission against Reconciliation, and I have realized over these past months that I have grown more than a little accustomed to your company. It– I would miss you if we were apart.” She jolts backwards at the last sentence, as if she’s startled by her own words, and her hands windmill as she recollects her thoughts.

“This is not my entire reasoning, of course,” she adds quickly. “I am comfortable in Kepler, and it has been a joy to be close to Leo Tarkesian and Doctor Sarah Drake, and to have gained so many friends here is a blessing I had never expected to experience. But, Duck Newton, I cannot sit idly knowing there is a great travesty happening to this planet. It would go against my nature, and my training, and my belief in the importance of doing what is right!” She slams one fist into the opposite palm, pose stern and proud, only to wash the strength away with a frown. “But I do not want to intrude.”

Duck watches her for a long moment – the way she slowly deflates, the quick pace of her breathing and the way it betrays her nerves, the vibrant blue of her eyes as they scour his face for signs of reassurance. His chest warms like he’s inhaled a bowl of soup, and he reaches out again to touch her arm, just to remind himself she’s tangible, that this slushy day in April isn’t some false dream his brain has created to make him feel better.

For half a year Duck has been driving himself crazy thinking he was being too clingy. Minerva, apparently, has been doing the same thing. He almost laughs.

“Yeah, I mean, they’d– they’d probably kill for someone like you down there,” he says. Minerva’s hand slides up to find his and squeezes with an excessive, reassuring strength. “Cuttin’ it kinda close, though, aren’t you?”

“These are the benefits of having friends in the know, Wayne Newton! Madeline Cobb has procured me false documents of identity so I may leave this country and enter another, and Ranger Juno Divine has promised to speed my application forward so I might join you both!” 

Her grin is warm enough to rival the sun. The lingering worry in Duck’s mind melts like the last icicles of spring, leaving only a reflective smile in its wake.


	2. Listen

The first time he decides to walk in the woods after a day of planting and surveying, Duck asks if he should be concerned about bears, and Juno nearly laughs herself hysterical. She pats Duck’s shoulder and fishes out a binder chocked full of information packets from the ten years Seed The Future has been active. Some are yellowed with age and made with the smudging ink of a typewriter, but still sufficiently highlight the animals he actually has to be cautious about. She advises him to go with someone – this isn’t the Monongahela, so he can’t carry weaponry to protect himself against some of the more dangerous game, and he doesn’t know the terrain as well as the forests of home. He folds up a pamphlet bearing a map and tucks it into his back pocket, assuring her he has someone already in mind. 

“Take Minerva,” she nearly begs, “She’s been keeping the volunteers from their paperwork and I need to have those forms ready to go with the foreman she when leaves the site tomorrow.”

Duck doesn’t bother feeding her amusement by saying that’s what he’d planned on anyway.

Minerva is, as she has been from day one, a constant source of enthusiasm. She’s the most energetic volunteer in the field, easily burning through the stocks of saplings they’re sent out to plant on a daily basis and barrelling on to help the rest of the crew. Their coworkers have taken a liking to her for that reason – when the quota of trees for each lot is met early, everyone has more downtime to explore and appreciate the sights. Duck knew when he signed up to volunteer that there’d be hard work involved, but hadn’t truly understood how much strain a day spent bending and lifting would have on his back, so he too has been more than happy for the help. Minerva, strong as she is, doesn’t seem to be affected by the workload at all. Duck finds her sitting around a few portable coolers with some of the other volunteers, munching on granola bars, and she nearly leaps to attention the second he asks if she’s busy. 

“I dunno if you’re interested, but, uh– one of the French guys spotted a flock of macaws just west of the C site this mornin’,” he says, hands shoved in the pockets of his cargo shorts, rolling a ball of thread between his fingers as his tongue tumbles over sentence structure. The entire group of volunteers stares up at him like classmates during a presentation; Minerva’s face lights up. “I was thinkin’ of takin’ a stroll out that way, see if I can find ‘em. They’re, uh– these big blue and yellow birds, and, uh–”

Minerva is on her feet within moments, shouting an excited, “Yes! Come, Duck Newton, we will hunt down these fascinating creatures!” and immediately strides for the outskirts of their camp. Duck has to hustle to catch up, and tries to ignore the sly looks the other volunteers give him as they hand him a gallon of water for the trail.

He should be surprised that doing something as peaceful as strolling through a rainforest appeals to Minerva at all, let alone is something that he enjoys doing with her, but she proves to be a perfect companion. She walks with long strides and loud footsteps, but heeds Duck immediately when he tells her to be still, and grips his arm in delight each time he points out an animal obscured by the leaves. She listens closely when the nerd kid in him gets excited about some kind of wild shit he never thought he’d see, and when he catches himself rambling and goes pink in the ears, she smiles with a sort of softness he’s only just getting to know. She’s endlessly enthusiastic about spotting things as they wander, and constantly bothers Duck to read her plant names from the guidebook he bought in the airport when they’d first arrived. She repeats the Portuguese names with the loud enthusiasm only Minerva has, and Duck realizes that his vocabulary for the resident flora is sticking in his brain simply because he can recall it in her voice. 

She frequently darts into the brush to closer inspect things, and even scales a few of the trees – the muscles of her back ripple through her sweat-soaked shirt as she clambers hand over hand into the branches of a large barrigona palm, and Duck finds himself watching with something between envy and appreciation. It’s a bit like traveling with a class of schoolkids, something he’d done a few times in the Monongahela, only instead of corralling fifteen miniature humans, he’s spending time with one alien woman nearly twice his size, who’s fully capable of handling herself (forgiving the one time she tries to touch a poisonous frog). Duck had chosen the park ranger life under the guise of it being absolutely peaceful, mundane work, but Minerva has a way of bringing out the wonder in the experience.

“How incredible,” she sighs, watching the flickering shapes of hyacinth macaws moving through the canopy of leaves above them, and Duck nods, eyeing the reverent hand she’s pressed to her chest and how closely her irises match the blue sea of feathers.

The heat is sweltering. They easily decimate the gallon of water they’ve brought and still go back to camp thirsty, exhausted, and raving hungry. Juno jokes that they must be growing teenagers, given the rate they consume every food product they can get their hands on. Collapsing into one of the plentiful lawn chairs scattered around basecamp is a relief worth moaning over. Hiking in the rainforest is arguably as much, if not more, work than the actual tree-planting, and yet Duck finds himself looking forward to it. 

He catches Minerva hunched over his guidebook in the glow of a kerosene lamp and under the protective wrapping of a mosquito net late one evening, memorizing creatures and plants she’ll later challenge him to help her find on their hikes. He hasn’t ever known her to be unaware of her surroundings, but she jumps when he offers her a Luna Bar and leans over her study notes. She’s still new to writing English, for as fluently as she can speak it, and her notebook is chock full of singular words neatly copied from the guide. There are alien symbols next to half the entries, and the Portuguese translations duplicated letter by letter alongside. She’s a faster student than he ever was – she routinely tests him on his translation while they walk, and each object she finds that she knows is exposed to the ceremony of its name recited in two languages and a careful air-drawing of how to write it. They hike up a cliffside with a frankly amazing view over an expanse of walking palms one day, and Duck realizes he’s grinning as he watches her etch out the long Latin term for the plant.

Volunteering in the Amazon, Duck has discovered, is a completely different experience from what he’d initially expected. Granted, his initial expectation had (somehow) not included his former mentor, and he’s not blind to the fact that she’s made the world-shifting choice a hundred times more interesting. Regular Guy Duck Newton, having travelled thousands of miles to do grunt forestry work in an environment he knows nothing about, with no friends and a complete lack of fluency in the local tongue, would have given up this nonsense within a month. Duck The Apparent Adventure-Seeker is studying a whole new biosphere on another continent with a close friend and a back free of the weight of destiny, and is enchanted in a way he hadn’t figured possible.

There are nights he misses Kepler, of course. He lies awake staring at the ramshackle ceiling of his shared bunk building, schooling his breath to take the edge off the sharp pangs in his heart, thinking of the people on the other side of a destroyed portal, and of the warmth and home cookery of the Amnesty Lodge. He tries to recall the cool crisp air of the Monongahela, the smell of pine, the cricket chirps and wolf howls in the night, the fog around the split mountain. But then he thinks of Minerva, only a building away – the way she shouts his name every morning, the intense focus she gives their conversations, the careful way she handles each baby tree she plants, just like Duck showed her – and the unfamiliar night becomes comfortable enough again to close his eyes to. 

Duck wouldn’t call this new chapter of his life ideal, but there’s a charm to it. Sometimes he revels in how good the lukewarm water from his pack is when he’s roasting in the humidity, or how deeply some of the other volunteers can make him laugh. Sometimes he notices how the sounds of the forest surround the camp like an embrace, and appreciates the kinship of those who are just as passionate about its protection. Sometimes, he realizes how good he has it.

Other times, Duck Newton regrets every choice he’s made since he the night he fought his first abomination, and wishes he’d never followed the ridiculous impulse to leave his dull, cyclical lifestyle behind.

Minerva is fast, is the problem. She’s 90% muscle and another 45% impulse, with some other math-defying percentage of pure alien stamina. When they take a new turn on their long hike of the day and she goes rushing towards a loud racket of machinery in the distance, Duck knows, with the kind of precognizance that normally sticks to his prophetic dreams, that there’s a bad situation snowballing in front of his eyes. He hauls ass after her, but her height lends her a longer gait, and there’s nothing on Earth that can catch Minerva when she’s motivated by curiousity. She crashes through a wall of brush and leaves a cartoonish hole in her wake; Duck ends up with a face full of leaves as he struggles to follow, praying no parasitic insects make home in his hair or down his shirt along the way.

He catches up to her seconds before she puts herself in danger, and with just enough fuel left in his wheezing lungs to grab for her arm. Minerva has frozen, battle-ready, at the edge of a clearing, where tree trunks have been cleaved so recently as to still be bleeding sap. There are fresh stacks of raw lumber piled high around them. She’s staring down the expanse of clear-cut with furious horror in her eyes; Duck’s fingers just miss the hard curl of her fists as she marches towards the logging crew and their vehicles, already roaring.

“Humans! Cease this! You have brought devastation upon this land!”

“Minerva!” Duck shouts, grabbing at her shirt and hauling backwards, as if his stocky strength is any match for her fury. She swats his hand away and powers forward, gathering the gazes of the crew like fresh fruit set before flies. The engine of a skidder rumbles into a quieter gear as its driver sets it to idle, and he tilts his hardhat up as he leans out of the cockpit. He calls out a question in Portuguese.

“You have struck down every tree in this section of forest, humans! This is unacceptable!” Minerva stalks up the incline before the various logging equipment, easily lifting away a felled tree as it blocks her path. The gathering group of workers, peeking around their vehicles like meerkats from burrows, balk in alarm, and began shouting to each other in a language neither of them can parse. The panic and threat of violence grows heavy in the air. “The rainforest is meant to be protected! Cease your destruction or I shall do it for you!”

Duck clambers around her as quickly as her can, swearing under his breath, and waves his hands towards the loggers; he catches one man near the back of a truck reaching slowly for something, his eyes locked on Minerva, and Duck’s hammering heart nearly shatters his ribs. 

“It’s okay! We’re not– Minerva, knock it off, you’re gonna–” he turns his pleading gestures her way, gripping at her elbows and bracing his feet in the sawdust in a vain attempt to slow her advance. 

“Stand down, Duck Newton! These men are a danger to the forest!”

“And you’re a fuckin’ danger to yourself,” he hisses, shoving her as best he can. Minerva stops, but of her own volition, her legs braced and arms relaxed as vipers before a strike. She glares at the collection of workers with her chin held high, fury rumbling in her slow breath. “These guys are packing heat, Minerva. They’re doing a job, and it might be wrong, okay, but things don’t work here like they do back home. We can’t fight them.” 

“I am no coward,” she says, malice in the words, and her eyes flick down at him. 

“Listen, you take these fuckers on and you’re going to get yourself killed. This isn’t our fight, alright? Don’t you dare get yourself shot over a bunch of trees.” Duck’s voice cracks as a fear born from experience bubbles up in his chest, one that too eagerly paints an image of Minerva bleeding out on the carpet of greenery. He can feel his grip on her arms shaking. “Back _off.”_

Minerva stares at him for a long moment, her expression still and cold as glacial ice. Duck can feel a dozen sets of eyes on his back, and prays the snippets of Portuguese he catches between the rumbling of engines aren’t instructions to take him out while he’s turned away. There was no small amount of reading his sister had forced upon him when he announced his plans to help out in the reforestation effort; he’d flipped through a hundred or so articles about illegal logging operations and the violent lengths groups were willing to go to to protect their economic interests. Not every person amongst the trees of Brazil were here for as beneficial a purpose as their own restoration group – Duck knows there’s a very real chance that he and Minerva could become missing person cases if things go any further south. 

“Please, Minerva,” he says, soft and nervous and unashamedly pleading, and her jaw clenches at him, full to the brim with angry words. 

She spits the curses at the loggers instead, in a language thick with Z sounds and rolled consonants, one no one but she knows, before slowly backing away. Each heavy crunch of her boots on the ground is a drumbeat in the tense moment; Duck lifts his arms to the sides to show he’s unarmed before carefully glancing at the workers and backing away himself. The crew remain still as statues until they’ve left the clearing completely.

Minerva doesn’t speak to him the entire way back to camp, nor at dinner, nor through the next few days of work. She barely acknowledges his proximity. Gone are the delighted, “Wayne Newton!”s that punctuated each morning, and she outright refuses his offers of water when they’re out in the field. Even the other volunteers start growing uncomfortable with her sour mood; conversations piddle away when she marches past them, only to resurface as whispers in her wake. Duck decides after several tries to console her that he’ll leave her to her childlike tantrum for as long as she deems appropriate, but that only lasts until Juno hauls him into her supervisor’s cabin and nearly throttles him against the wall.

“You talk to your goddamn girlfriend, Duck Newton, or so help me, I’m deporting you the second the sun comes up,” she threatens, shaking his lapels for emphasis. Duck sighs, frustrated and loud, his head lolling back into the plywood, and closes his eyes in defiance of the entire situation.

“What d’you want me to do, Juno?” he grumbles. “She’s not interested in talkin’.”

“Then try something else, ‘cause Minerva’s gonna burn herself out on this trail she’s blazin’.” Duck squints at her, surprised to find concern where every other look from the staff has been of disdain or judgement. She rolls her eyes and swats the side of his head, knocking his hat askew. “Everybody’s gettin’ less done without her. Team morale is in the shitter. Meanwhile she’s filling three times the quota she’s supposed to, like some kind of tree-planting machine. You seen her at meals, Duck? You been payin’ attention to when she goes to bed?”

“Well, fuckin’– fill me in, then,” he says, brushing her grip away, curiousity overcoming his frustration. Juno folds her arms, only to lift a hand and scrub at her face. 

“What’d you do? Is this– this better not be some kind of romantic drama, Newton, because I sure as shit am not sitting the two of you down like a camp counselor with a couple of preteens.”

“What’s with– no, man, fuck, that’s not even on the table.” Heat trickles up Duck’s neck in spite of his words, and adds confusion to the soup of concern and annoyance he’s had brewing in his stomach for days. “I don’t even wanna know where that’s coming from. No, Juno, she got confrontational on a logging team and is just– mad at me for not letting her start an international incident.” Juno peers up at him from between her fingers, absolute exasperation painted across her features.

“Neither of you meatheads got hurt, right?” she asks in a sigh. “I don’t even know how I’d write the paperwork if one of you got shot and has some magic healing bullshit covering the evidence.”

Duck shakes his head in response to her question and brushes a hand through his hair, feeling as worn as Juno looks. The last rays of sunlight are painting the interior of Juno’s cabin in vivid colours, and draw Duck’s gaze to the stacks of folders and reports spread across her desk. The room is flanked in cases of water bottles and dried goods, and he can just see a PDF on her laptop keeping tally of all the species and soil contents they’ve been monitoring. When Duck signed up to help in the reforestation effort, he’d applied as a volunteer and been moved up the chain of command due to his experience in the field; Juno’s newfound fame in the parks service, meanwhile, had landed her the opportunity to play an authority role in this whole organization. He’d thought that her interest in his paperwork and Minerva’s excited rambling about the rainforest was at most bemused, but she took the duty seriously. They’re here under different titles, but Duck can’t help feeling kindred to Juno, for both their shared history and the wilted way she stands under the pressure of responsibility.

“Where’s she at, last you saw her?” he asks, and her slumped shoulders lift the slightest bit at his question.

True to her guess, Duck finds Minerva out in the field after all the rest of the volunteers have finished up and left, a good half mile from camp. There’s a pickup truck full of saplings flanking her on one side, and a straight wall of uncut forest on the other. She trudges through the pattern of digging holes and placing trees like an automaton gone feral, all practiced repetition with angry edges. Duck’s footing slips as he watches her spear the ground with a shovel from several feet away by launching it like a javelin; she lifts the hefty root ball of a sapling with single-handed ease. Her shirt is cut low in the back, and the sweat dripping down her spine catches the red rays of dusk like glimmering lines of paint. The streaks travel along the flexing curves of her muscles and define the shapes with a sort of harshness made for war gods.

Duck’s never been a diplomat, nor involved in many fights – he sees less of a puzzle to solve in Minerva’s body language, and more of a friend upset. So instead of starting their interaction with clever phrases or practiced debate fodder, he approaches Minerva with his hands passively in his pockets. The first words off his lips aren’t riddled with apology or explanation, but instead a gentle, teasing, “Now, somebody told me plants grow up stronger if you’re a little rough with ‘em. Is that the plan?”

Minerva turns to look at him with narrowed eyes, already bristling. Duck doesn’t doubt she could spear him as easily as she had the earth and leave him trampled in the dirt in the blink of an eye, and her imposing figure certainly brings the image to light as a possibility. But Duck’s known her too long to be properly intimidated, and keeps on his slow walk towards her. 

“I do not wish to speak to you, Duck Newton,” she says, her loud voice as heavy as lead in the cooling air. She stomps down on the dirt she’s packed around her planting, and heaves another two saplings out of the back of the truck. Duck follows her down the line of her work; several of the trees are crooked where she’s trampled the ground too harshly on one side. He reaches for the unattended shovel before she can collect it, ramming it into the next space and quietly peeling back the dirt and greenery. Minerva drops the trees she’s carrying in front of him, and turns on a heel to collect more.

They play a silent game of forced patience until the sun has near-fully set behind the mountains and Duck is just as drenched in sweat as she is. He scrubs a hand across the small of his back to soothe the ache, and catches Minerva looking at him, her brows folded but the fire of her emotions gone with the sun.

“You have dug more holes than there are plants,” she says.

“Aw, shit,” Duck sighs, and tugs up the bottom of his tee shirt to wipe at his forehead. “Got a little too into the rhythm there.” 

“I will collect more.”

“Minerva,” he calls to her retreating back, before her hand can meet the door handle of the vehicle she definitely doesn’t have the licence to drive. He’s rarely seen regret in her posture, as powerful as her confidence is and as certainly as Minerva believes in everything she does, but there’s an unfamiliar slouch in her reaching arm. “Hey, I’m sorry, okay? Not for– look, I’m not apologising for keeping you out of a fight we weren’t gonna win, but I– I know it ain’t easy seeing people undo all the work we’re doin’ here.”

Minerva’s hand falls to her side, but she’s otherwise still for a long moment. Something caws in the trees behind them, and the sound echoes on for a distance. The far off generators of their camp sputter to life, and Duck can just see the glow of the lamplights among the trees. 

“This is where I live now, Wayne Newton,” she says, the words as slow and deliberate as honey spiralling off a spoon. “I have watched a world become barren and empty at my own hands, and I cannot stand by and allow the same to happen to another. I followed you to this new place because I believed in the cause I understood restoration to be. Was I wrong?”

Duck’s footsteps are loud in the stillness. The fallen leaves and soggy mulch compress underneath his boots like a plush carpet. The plain they’re standing in bears the same scars as the logging operation they’d come across, only healed with time and freshly-filled with the promise of a greener future. 

“That’s the part of all this that really grinds the gears if you think about it too hard. The whole world’s made of wood. Like, wood and plastic, and steel, and a bunch of other stuff, but like– we build all our big shit out of trees. And there’re billions of people buildin’ things all the time, so the demand never goes away.”

“The solution should not be to clear away entire swathes of jungle.”

“No, you’re right. That’s why I came down here, and sounds like that’s why you did too.” Duck steadies himself beside her, watching the treeline. A cloud of bats rises into the air over of the camp, and the light flickers as it’s punctured by their silhouettes. He glances up and finds Minerva taking in the same show, but with sadness in the crinkles around her eyes. He sighs. “It’s complicated, y’know? We’ve got governments from a hundred different places makin’ things hard, and a couple handfuls of rich guys who don’t give a flying fuck about the planet taking whatever they want in pretty much whatever way they want to. And there’s more of them takin’ things than there are of us puttin’ it back.”

Minerva takes a deep, resolute breath, and decides, “I would wage war upon them, given the chance.”

“There’s about eight different layers of bureaucracy between sayin’ that and doin’ that, Minerva.” His laugh is as dry as sandpaper. “This isn’t like fighting abominations. Lots of people would’ve already done it if it was that straightforward. Stickin’ yourself into the melee’s just gonna get you arrested or killed, and I’m not too proud to beg you not to do that to me.”

“I cannot be… passive, Wayne Newton. It is not in my nature.”

“Dunno that I’d call all the work you’re doing here nothing,” he shrugs, leaning around her to look across the lines of saplings she’s driven into the dirt. 

“But when any tyrant can clear it with no consequence, what point does it serve? I become another bystander to a great crime. I let another planet crumble around me, because I do not act accordingly.” Her voice grows in heat, though not in strength, and Minerva’s eyes are closed tightly. Duck has known her as more than a spectre for only a little over two years, and there are nuances to her body language that he’s still learning to parse. For all her grand gestures of excitement and enthusiasm, Minerva holds negativity close to her chest – a side effect of solitude, he has to assume. She’s been the last survivor of her planet for at least as long as he and Leo have known her, which would put the count at fifty-odd years. 

Duck can’t help feeling like a heel, when he recalls how earnestly he avoided her for most of their acquaintance.

But the past being what it is, Minerva has become incredibly good at smothering her emotions and keeping them masked away where even the closest to her struggle to see. Duck’s been watching, though, since he’s started spending time with her, and he’s constantly on the lookout for chinks in her armour. He’s picked up on some of the more obvious ticks – quietness, an avoidance of eye contact, and this rare self-effacing talk are all signs of a regret so deeply buried Duck suspects he’ll never see it. 

“Feels kinda hopeless,” he says with a sigh, “I know what you mean. Hey, and from one powerless human to– well, wait, not another– fuck.” To his great surprise, Minerva looks down at him as he tries to reorganize his thoughts over the fumble, her blue eyes searching his face in the faint light. “Look, you’re only one person. You don’t have to be leading a guerrilla force to be making a difference in how the world works. Sometimes the best ‘fuck you’ in your arsenal is the one that builds things. The– the one that gets up at the asscrack of dawn and plants a tree for every one being cut down. It isn’t your job to take down every evil that pops out of the ground, y’know?”

“The order I was trained by would beg to differ,” she counters quietly.

“Yeah, and those geniuses are dead,” Duck sniffs, biting his tongue a second too late. Minerva sighs, and her lips twitch upward a fraction before her entire body slumps. The proud line of her posture goes as flaccid as a fern in a thunderstorm, as if the conversation is heavy water she’s trying to roll off her back. Duck hesitates for a moment, arm lifted, before settling a hand onto the curve of her spine and rubbing gently. 

Minerva is an absolute force of nature, normally, a C4 explosion among sparklers, but the very act of standing against gravity seems to be suddenly too much. Duck’s seen this kind of tiredness before. In the days after losing Ned, Aubrey had heaved the pressure of keeping the Sylphs safe onto her back before she’d properly addressed the death of their friend, and grown frail under the weight of both. In his experience, a guiding hand and proper rest were the best ways to lighten the load.

“Let’s get some food into you,” he murmurs, nudging her towards the truck and swinging back to grab the shovel lest Juno flay him. It clatters loudly as he chucks it into the dusty, empty bed that was once full of saplings. He hops into the front seat of the vehicle, his back twinging, just as Minerva does.

She reaches out to him as he leans to buckle his seatbelt, her broad palm easily enveloping his neck, and hauls him closer. Her forehead presses against his own, clammy with dried sweat and warming the damp hair sticking to his skin. The wide curve of her nose is nearly brushing his. Her dark eyelashes twitch in his cross-eyed vision like butterfly wings at rest, and the slow exhale that tumbles off her tongue washes over his jaw like a thank you.

Duck freezes.

She lets him go as if she’s loathe to, her fingers smoothing under his ear as they slowly retreat, and then falls back into her seat like a puppet with its wires cut, lolling into the headrest with her eyes still closed. She doesn’t move when Duck drops the keys in his fumble to start the vehicle, nor during the entire slow, rumbling ride back to camp. When Duck swings into the gravel parking lot and kills the engine, her soft snores make up the white noise in its wake.

“Alright,” Duck murmurs to himself, with the density of the night and the enclosed space surrounding him like a heavy blanket. The far-off lamp that marks the door of the supervisor’s cabin has stretched a line of light across the grass and truck hood to brush Minerva’s face, and the luminescence traces the arcs of her cheekbones like a tender hand. He watches her sleep for probably a little too long, curious of the arm she’s wrapped guardedly around her own stomach and the stillness on her normally expressive face. When the squirming confusion in his chest finally settles, he taps her knuckles gently to rouse her – and could swear she tries to take his hand.

Duck finds, once he’s curled up in the bunkhouse and letting himself drift into the harbour of sleep, that that same hand feels empty, despite how closely he’s curled his fingers and how snugly the fist is pressed to his chest.

Minerva startles him the next morning by sitting on the end of his cot and nearly toppling it, so Duck wakes up scrambling for balance and to the loud ring of her embarrassed laughter. She leans over where he lays sprawled in the kicked off sheets, wiping his face and trying to still his pounding heart, and hands him a warm cup of coffee. The familiar energy she’s so known for fills the room like the light of morning after a long solstice night.

“Supervisor Juno Divine has given us the day off,” she says, and rests a palm on his knee. “Would you like to go hiking with me?”


	3. Share

The Seed The Future camp has a morning routine, which dictates when the day starts and whose turn it is to serve breakfast. (They have an everything routine, in fact, because how else could they keep track of and control a hundred volunteers at once?) It’s likely the fault of the circadian pattern his job has imposed, but Duck’s found himself adapting to a natural sort of rhythm as the sun rises in the boonies of Brazil. He always wakes with the dawn, both because the forest comes so alive with bird calls that they act as an alarm clock, and because the shuffling and snoring of his fellow bunkmates is just as disturbing once he’s lost the heavy weight of sleep. Rising can be a bit more of an effort, depending on how sore he is from the previous day’s injuries and strain.

Duck swings his legs over the mattress and spends a long while stretching and popping his stiff joints before hauling clean clothes out of his bag and making for the brick bathhouse across the main field of their campsite. He’s guaranteed to be soaked in sweat by midday – long hours in the beating sun hauling heavy things will do that to you – but the nights are humid enough on their own to merit a rinse off straight out of bed. Sometimes he’s lucky and a squall of rain will do the work for him. The first few weeks he’d tried his best to cover his head and fresh clothes against the downpours, but experience has taught Duck not to shun a rinse when he can get it, and that the heat of the day will dry him sooner than later anyway.

(He’s come to breakfast with his hair plastered to his head and shirt drenched through to an applause of quacking more than once, but Duck can appreciate a good pun.)

He’s a strong advocate of coffee in the morning, and Duck’s lucky enough to be living in a country that grows the beans; he suspects he’ll be forever ruined for the instant morning brew he used to have back in Kepler. A freshly-ground-and-percolated mug of the stuff becomes his best friend for the early dawn period until every else wakes. He tends to wander the camp with it, looking over the seedlings in the growhouse by the hill and admiring the distant mountains as the sun paints them gold. He'll snatch up a newspaper if he can find one (though mostly to look over the photos and pick out what few Portuguese words he’s learned in his time here). He tends to check the mail at the end of his pre-breakfast tour both out of irresistible curiosity and to avoid being teased about what a habit it's become.

The post only comes into camp once a week or so, when Juno goes out to town or when a delivery comes in and the volunteer transporting it decides to be thoughtful, but Duck peeks into the mail bin every morning regardless. He has good reason to, he thinks, given that the Lodge is constantly sending letters and has gotten him into a routine of sending them back. The postcards he’s received from Kepler are pinned up around his bed, and their outdated photographs blend in well with the worn wood and plaster aesthetic of the bunkhouse. Being able to look them over at night and reading them to Minerva as they come in have both become important rituals in reminding him they have a family some thousand miles away thinking about them. Juno, just as much an early riser, catches him peeking this morning and shoves a parcel into his hands with a yawn.

He passes the unwrapped contents on to Minerva when he spots her chattering with friends at one of the picnic tables outside the kitchen, and she startles from her conversation with the same routine “Wayne Newton!” that greets him every morning. He tucks himself into the bench and spreads out his plate of food, waving a hand to signal that she can disregard him until he’s had a few bites. She pats his arm in acknowledgement and goes back to drilling her companions on the languages of their birthplaces, lighting up with excitement every time she convinces one of them to speak it for her.

The crowd cycles through a few simple sentences in Korean, Arabic, and some sort of Nordic tongue before they start asking Minerva in various states of English fluency to speak her own language. 

“You will not understand it,” she says, but to Duck’s surprise, concedes – the heavy slurred Z sounds and halting aspirations of her native tongue are fascinating to hear, as is the word she says on an inhale. Her own title pops up in the sentence, the only bit of familiarity Duck can pick up on, and he can’t help trying to mimic the way she rolls the N of her name under his breath. She catches him trying, and the sly smile she gives him is embarrassingly fond. When the crowd asks her for what must be the thousandth time where she came from, she cites, “Kepler,” and Duck’s heart hiccups in his chest.

But she isn’t completely off base – the quiet town in West Virginia is as much a home to her now as this mess of low budget buildings in South America, as evidenced by the letters the Sylphs at the Lodge have written up. The mail is generally addressed to both of them, but the contents favour her. There are passages from Jake specifically detailing the state of the snow on the mountain, and he draws silly doodles of Minerva and himself snowboarding along the bottom of the paper. Mama always checks in on her health. The various penmanship across the page indicate the letters are passed around the Lodge so anyone who wants to say hello can – someone usually asks how she’s adjusting, several inquire about what things they’ve seen or done, and at least one penpal will suggest animals they should try and spot. Minerva huddles over Duck’s shoulder as he reads to her, absolutely delighted every time, and she keeps each letter likewise posted around her own bunk, the pages loose and flaring outward like a hedge of paper flowers. 

The note at the bottom of this letter gives a little heads up on the status of their friends in Sylvain (“Thacker’s gone wandering in the wilds with a new friend he won’t say much about, and the news through the grapevine is that Aubrey’s exploring the plains out west,”) and is signed with a sketchy “XO, Mama” and a “PS – books are for Minerva. Study up, hon.”

Two thin, colourful children’s books have been sent along in the brown paper envelope. Minerva flips one open carefully to reveal guidelines to drawing various letters of the alphabet, and practice words framed with cartoonish drawings of animals. Duck snorts bemusedly when he sees that the second, similar book is West Virginia-themed, but the absolute awe in Minerva’s posture keeps him from making any sort of comment about it. He watches her trace the images on the cover of one of the books with a reverent finger and grin, murmuring something soft in the language of her birth.

“Y’like it?” he asks, as if the answer isn’t clear across her features. 

“These are wonderful,” she nods, and leans a little heavier into his side. Her toothy smile simmers down to leave an unfamiliar tenderness around her eyes, Duck finds himself transfixed by by how willing she is to let down her emotional armour in his presence.

There aren’t a lot of items Minerva can call hers. The duffle bag Barclay gave her was packed with the essential clothes and toiletries necessary for their trip, but those were all scrounged up and donated by their friends. The limited storage space at the basecamp doesn’t exactly allow or necessitate the gathering of household goods, and the ranger station they stayed in before the volunteers arrived was just as temporary. Minerva doesn’t seem to be much of a material person to begin with, and between her baldness and the martial art drills she does religiously every morning, there’s certainly been jokes made about her being raised as a monk. But Duck watches the way she gathers up every bit of the gift and beelines to her cabin to add the letter to the shrine-like display above her bed, and he wonders if her lack of collections before now was more of a sign that she hadn’t found anything worth hanging on to.

Duck spends the day’s efforts in the field within earshot of Minerva and her foreign friends. For a long while they lament the English language for its tricks and inconsistency, hooting as Minerva shares some of her favourite idioms (“And one can still ‘let their hair down’ even without hair!”), and she beams as she tells them about the gift she was sent. Erik gets the cassette player in the pickup truck blasting an awful Jimmy Buffett album near the end of their rotation, and the group of them start drumming along using everything from their boots in the dirt to the metal doors of the vehicle. Duck folds his arms over the handle of his shovel and chuckles as Minerva throws herself into the foolishness with gusto – she trips hopping back into the truck bed for the last few saplings, and laughs, “It appears I have two left feet!”

He catches her studying with the language books later that night. Downtime on the campground always sees people disperse like soap put onto greasy water, and Minerva’s chosen spot is practically off base entirely, at the edge of the camp that best overlooks the valley below. There’s a small LED lantern set on the table, and she’s propped one of the guides open and upright with a small stack of rocks. Minerva sits straighter as Duck approaches, staring off towards the rising moon on the horizon, and her body is haloed with the faint glow, making her look a bit like the phantom silhouette she was when Duck first met her.

Nighttime in the Amazon is different. The air holds a dampness unlike the mountain atmosphere of the Appalacians, and it’s made warm with the effort of a million trees breathing at once. It’s less quiet, too, vivid with chattering animal calls and the hum of insects even in the latest hours. It’s drastically divergent from anything Duck’s ever known, and a far cry from the desert planet Minerva’s talked about in passing. Somehow they’d ended up here, as two foreigners in an unfamiliar wilderness, doing the work of arborists and biologists and frankly everything Duck has little to no training in, and the environment constantly challenges him to adapt. The disorientation keeps him from sinking into any sort of apathy, and Minerva’s presence lends a sense of familiarity that keeps him anchored. 

The rainforest is large and alien; Minerva is too, but Duck likes to think he knows her better.

That idea is rocked firmly out of place when he shuffles forward with a, “What’s up?” and Minerva’s head tilts just enough to highlight the thick haze of water glistening over her eyes. Her expression is as stoic as the rest of her, nearly at peace, with no furrows at her brow or stiff clench to her jaw. She blinks slowly, staring out into the night.

“Listen, Wayne Newton,” she says, the usual enthusiasm in her voice muffled, and lifts her chin minutely in a gesture towards the trees. Duck fumbles his way down into a seat beside her, biting back a groan as his knees pop and setting down his soda. Even with a closer study of her face, Duck can’t properly identify the kind of upset she’s wearing, so errs on the side of comfort – his hand rises to rest on her shoulder, and Minerva leans into the touch.

The evening is full of commotion. The climate here has made way for thousands of species of creature to thrive, and few seem to hide away when the sun disappears. There are far off flutters and clicks of bats in flight, hunting down the endless buzzing insects. The occasional caw of a bird or shriek of a nocturnal mammal cut the humid air. There’s a river not far from the table they’re sitting at, and a chorus of peeping frogs serenade them from that direction.

“Hey,” he says, gentle and hesitant, “You alright?”

“It is so very similar,” Minerva replies, subdued. Her hands are folded across the picnic table, and the long loops of the blue tattoos that line her arms are stark against her skin in the low light. The XXL tee shirt Juno butchered into a tank top for her hangs loose over her shoulders, and dips low on her broad chest. Duck whips his gaze away when he realizes he’s staring, and glances out at the trees instead. 

The song of the peeping frogs grows to a crescendo, and Minerva seems muted by the tune. She closes her eyes as if listening causes her pain, but holds her breath as if she can’t bear not to. Slowly, she says, “Those creatures make an uncanny noise. It is nearly identical to the call of the_ îthyches_ from Miralaviniax Orbital Body Five.”

“You’re homesick,” he guesses, and squeezes her shoulder.

“I am nostalgic,” she replies. Her tone is decisive in the way only Minerva’s ever is, without room for ruefulness or regret. There’s no warble in her voice to betray her emotion, nor hiccup in her breathing. But after a pause, she unwinds her hands. One rises to rest carefully over his, and her fingertips press against his skin like they’re wanting and unable to ask for support.

Duck rubs a cautious path across her skin with his thumb. She pulls the touch the slightest bit closer, so he keeps doing it. 

“Do you… d’y’wanna tell me about it? I dunno if it’ll– I mean, we’ve been drilling you with info about Earth pretty much constantly, but you’ve, uh… you’ve never said a whole lot about where you’re from. And maybe that’s a… that could be an alien thing, I dunno, maybe there’re some cult secrets I’m not allowed to know, but if you wanna talk about home, I’m all ears.”

The faintest smile cracks through her stone expression.

“I am home, Duck Newton,” she says, and the familiar spark that makes her voice hers bubbles up through the melancholy, as if he’s touched on some kind of inside joke. One of her fingers curls on the back of his hand, mimicking the movement of his thumb. Her inhumanly-coloured irises are jewel-like in the glare of the stars, but lose some of their shine as she finally lifts a palm to wipe away the threat of tears. “And as the last remaining member of my Order, I am the only authority on whether or not you may know our secrets.”

“Total writeoff, then,” he jokes, and is surprised when Minerva snorts. 

“Perhaps they are not things you are ready to know.”

“Hey, no playing wise sensei, Minerva, you signed off on that when you named me your… whatever, your equal in magic space powers.”

“Magic space powers you have not practiced, Duck Newton.” The smile on her face is less pained this time, and Minerva ducks her head as a breathy laugh rushes out of her chest.

“Yeah, right, so I’ll just start calling you with my psychic powers from across the campsite, nobody’s gonna think anything of the guy talking to himself. Meal time, right? You’ll be out by the parking lot and I’m standing in line for eggs and sausages going, ‘You feeling Nutella on your toast, Minnie?’” The sourness around Minerva seems to wash away as he speaks, shoved along by her thin snickers. She leans back and turns to properly look at him. 

It’s still strange, talking like this – though it isn’t the first time Duck’s had a one-to-one with Minerva over the years, having her directly beside him and in person is still some kind of bizarre. It turns out she’s an excellent listener when they have the space and time to banter about something other than destiny, and Duck’s found there's a sense of humour behind all the formal posturing he’d initially known her for. Minerva might have been a symbol of power for her people as a war adviser, and an icon of wisdom and knowledge as his teacher, but the more he’s near her now the more Duck is starting to realize she’s a regular person under the titles, just like everyone else.

“Why do you call me that?” she asks suddenly, and Duck is so relieved to hear the energy back in her tone that it takes him a second to register what she’s asking. “You know my proper name.”

“It’s a nickname,” he shrugs, “Same as how I get everybody to call me ‘Duck’.”

“But I am comfortable with ‘Minerva’.”

“I can stop if it bugs you. It’s just a– y’know, like, we know each other.” Her eyebrows scrunch down, a familiar sign that she’s struggling to wrap her head around some foreign human concept. “It’s a– like a quick reference. You know I mean you when I say ‘Minnie’, right, it’s a–” He rolls his hand in a circle, trying to find the words. “Look, you’re allowed to call me Wayne, ‘cause we– we _know_ each other.”

“You are known by many people, Wayne Newton.”

“Nah, like–” he cringes up at the stars, searching for a way to explain without embarrassing himself by admitting that familiarity and a near-lifelong relationship has bred some kind of affection in him for his former thorn-in-the-side. “When somebody calls you something that’s not your name– but not an insult, obviously, I mean some kind of nickname or– or something cute like ‘hon’, that’s– it’s because they like– I mean, it’s usually a sign they like you. That you’re friends.” 

Minerva goes still for a long moment, and her fingers lift away from his hand; Duck hadn’t realized how much heat her touch had leant him until the spaces her fingertips had pressed start cooling in the breeze. 

“It is a term of… endearment,” she clarifies, settling back into her seat and starting Duck down with some kind of searching, undecipherable expression. He combs his hair back and concedes to her much simpler explanation. Minerva hums. “I do not mind it, then.”

She seems eager to return to her work, with the confusion and emotion cleared. Duck watches her gather up her pen and start flipping back through one of the guides Mama sent her; she resumes writing in the notebook that was fished from Thacker’s old study before they left home and given with his (distant) blessing. While Brazil was no Sylvain, it was still a foreign place full of potential adventure and intrigue that Thacker wanted to know about, and had asked them to record. Duck had forgotten the task almost immediately, but Minerva had been constantly asking he and other volunteers to notate events for her into the pages. The idea of independently journaling is clearly a strong motivator, if the long lines of letters she’s practicing are any indication. Her handwriting is neat and small, but awkward. It tilts in all the wrong places, since she’s unfamiliar with the symbols she’s scripting. She’s written her own name out across the top of the page with several different spellings, and his, with a particularly funny “Duk Nooton” scribbled out. 

“Looks like you’re getting the hang of it,” Duck comments, chin in hand. For someone working backwards in her language-learning, parsing pronunciation from known sound and new letters, her writing is surprisingly cohesive. 

“I am very intelligent,” she says offhandedly, copying out several words from the Native Flora and Fauna guidebook she’s long since commandeered from Duck. The page is dog-eared, and there are notes in her native language scribbled in the margins, the lines of which are much more sure and fluid.

Duck snorts. Minerva looks up at him then, her pen paused and a thoughtful little frown on her face.

“You believe I’m being arrogant. Duck Newton, I am intelligent in the same way you are brave and kind. I am stating a fact. My intellect was one of the reasons I was initially chosen.” 

Duck stumbles over the compliments for a hot second before he registers, “Wait, chosen?” 

Minerva is once again pulled from her studying, though the glance she throws his way is much slower coming, and a little nervous, as if she’s let slip something she hadn’t meant to. Her pen hovers over the paper, wiggling with thoughtful anticipation, as if it too is waiting to see whether she intends to lie or fess up a sliver of her past.

“When I was selected to join the Atraxin Order as a child, it was on the merits of my cleverness and adaptability,” she says slowly, rising up from her slouched position and sitting so her spine is perfectly straight; her tattoos gleam in the light of the lamp, looking suddenly less natural on her dark skin and more imposed upon her. “And it was my talent for strategy that encouraged my peers to elect me into the position of war councillor.”

“No shit,” says Duck. Minerva turns to look at him in the same way a child would under threat of punishment, hesitant and cautious. There’s no smile on her face, and a dangerous sort of brightness to her eyes. They flick over his face like she’s assessing him.

“Yes, well, cleverness is not the same thing as wisdom, I have discovered.” She touches the back of his hand with a bare two fingers, as if she’s waiting for him to bite. “Destroying Reconciliation brought me a strange sense of satisfaction. I had strived towards its end for nearly a century, and to watch Beacon crumble it was a wondrous sight to witness. When we entered its lair I quickly realized that one of our party would have to stay behind to open gates back to the worlds of Earth and Sylvain, and to undo the damage those creatures caused to whatever planets were still salvageable. I was prepared to take that role. I had not planned for– I am not sure how to feel about the creature you befriended saving us from destruction and aiding in the annihilation of its own culture.”

She looks towards the campsite, but without any clear focus, and Duck can see the muscles of her jaw working as she organizes her words. He hesitantly nudges his arm closer and draws his thumb over her knuckles, startled into silence by her confession but determined to assure her he’ll listen.

“It was willing to sacrifice itself to the cause, and it is responsible for the death of its own. That is a position I understand all too well. And to be honest, I had planned– I had expected that, were I not to find a way to destroy the creatures that set my world at war with another, then I would die on Five, knowing that I had trained warriors on other planets to protect themselves from the same fate.” The gloss returns to her eyes, so easily banished with humour before, and Duck’s heart sinks into his feet as her hand clenches into a tight fist under his touch. “And yet I am here.”

“Hey,” Duck murmurs, and wedges his fingers around the shape of her thumb; she grabs at him like a drowning man to a life preserver.

“And I am happy,” she spits, then collapses her face into her palm and sighs out the sudden anger. “I am happy, Wayne Newton, and I do not know what to do with that.”

The frogs behind them immediately spring into rapturous song, as if they’re the chorus to an epic opera Minerva’s spoken the last lyrics of. The sound rings out like a warning in the darkness, echoing across the campsite and into the embrace of the trees on the other side. Duck rubs slow circles over the tight grip of Minerva’s hand in his, and doesn’t comment on the crushing pressure against his joints.

“I think you probably… just gotta live with it, Minerva,” he says eventually, tracing the spiralling tattoo on the back of her palm. The peeping grows to a climax and then stops suddenly, save for a few cries that follow the torrent of sound like raindrops. “You don’t get to pull some heroic bullshit and– and die alone in space, and that’s arguably a pretty good thing.” A humourless laugh puffs past his lips, and Duck shrugs, adding, “I think you… you deserve to be happy, y’know?”

She remains a statue next to him, crumpled in grief, and Duck chews his lip.

“Look, I’m not gonna pretend you didn’t do some shit, alright? But you gotta keep moving forward. You’ve done your time suffering over it. Like you– you’re doing good things now. Nothing’s gonna make up for what happened on Five, but I– I know I wouldn’t’ve followed through on doing this if you hadn’t pushed me. On coming here. And you did that. And it– doing this means a lot to me. That’s not nothing, right?” 

She looks at him then, with a wild sort of surprise unlike he’s ever seen, her eyes wide and shimmering in the low light. It almost feels like a concession, to let her know she’s been right about something, but it isn’t the usual confidence that meets his admittance, only a long, searching stare and a slow, shaking exhale. She drops the palm holding her forehead and cradles their folded hands instead, watching the movement like she can’t believe her own limbs.

“Then I have finally succeeded in motivating you into doing something,” Minerva says, a notch above a whisper and with a plea for humour between every syllable. There’s an awkward, wobbly smile on her face.

“Yeah, good job,” Duck replies, taking the bait. “Now it’s my turn to play the bossy alien. Your training starts with spelling your name. Hand me the pen.”

Minerva is a more patient student than Duck has ever been to her. She listens intently to his fumbling as he tries to explain how English phonetics work, and doesn’t comment on the nervous warble in his voice. She lets him run through several practice sentences before she finally cracks and shows him that one of the books Mama sent her has more updated methods of sounding things out. She seems more amused than haughty about the reveal, though, so Duck lets it slide with a single exasperated groan.

Her hands remain wrapped around his the entire time.

“Hey, here’s an idea,” he says suddenly, swirling the dregs of his drink as Minerva finally releases him to search through her notebook for the name of a plant. “You’re learnin’ this stuff anyway, why not, like, write down– make a memoir or something? Write a book. You had some strong opinions about the whole logging thing going on here, and people do the– the self-publishing thing all the time. I dunno, you’d probably be pretty good at, like rallying the troops, gettin’ people to listen. Makin’ it sound important. It’d give you something to focus on, y’know? A– a fuckin’ new quest or something.” He rubs the back of his neck as he rambles, feeling more and more foolish as the word tumble across his tongue without prior screening. “Is that stupid? Maybe that’s stupid.”

“I am not so articulate on paper as I am in person, Duck Newton.”

“I mean, that’s what editors are for, right? Ask– Thacker was all about that shit, explorin’ and writing about it. Send Mama a letter, see if she can rope him into helping. Or– I dunno, you’re smart, give it a couple months and you’ll be writing fuckin’ dissertations, probably.”

She considers him with a surprising amount of sincerity, and Duck is struck for a moment how far their interactions have come. Once upon a time, they seemed to argue more than talk. Once, Minerva was a ghost at his bedside, making demands, her hands piled with obligation and metaphorical chains. The battle against Reconciliation and fulfillment of their shared destiny wiped that slate clean, and the woman at his side now feels more like a long-lost childhood friend – they’re comfortably used to each other, but still working out how they fit.

Minerva taps her pen thoughtfully on the page and reads over her own writing as if assessing it.

“If the responsibility for the health of this planet is not mine to bear alone, then it makes sense to convince others to join the campaign,” she reasons, the tattoos that line her forehead scrunching. “First-hand knowledge of the situation would make for strong motivation. I have been a respectable storyteller before, though I am very out of practice. But I am not– I fear I will choose the wrong words, and I do not wish to– to lead anyone astray again, and– Wayne, will it make a difference?”

“If it’s coming from you,” he says sincerely, catching the worrying thought before it can spin itself into any more frantic a spiral. Minerva holds his gaze for a long moment, her eyes flicking back and forth between his. Duck’s hand begins reaching for hers once more, but stops; Minerva’s fingers twitch as if they were considering the same. She glances out at the woods instead, tracing the long trunks of trees older than either of them, and nods.

Duck watches her scribe out a note specifically to send back to Kepler that night. The company of her former student and the sound of a lost homeworld play witness to her promise: to practice her penmanship each day with as much dedication as she does her martial arts. To tell stories of the adventures she and Duck have, and transcribe the tales that her new international friends tell her of their own lives. To show her new home the dangers it poses to itself, and to ask for help in protecting it. She encloses a first summarizing draft of her confrontation with the logging crew, and waxes poetic about the injustice of a world besieged by its own people for greed. She asks if someone at the Lodge would be willing to help her edit and organize the works into something cohesive that she can share – a storybook of warnings for those who might mimic any part of her mistakes, and of hopefulness for a better future.

Duck folds his arms on the table and helps her through the entire slow process, and tries not to read too deeply into the way she reaches for his fingers each time she has a question, or the tenderness in the little bubbles of laughter he manages to coax out of her. She seems to grow more assured as she writes, determinately pledging herself to this new quest with all the vigor she had the destruction of her enemies in another life. Something like pride flickers in Duck’s chest as he watches her invest herself to something positive, and as she gathers up her finished work with a great yawn and settled shoulders, he says, “I’m– glad you’re happy, and here, for what it’s worth.”

The smile that works its way across her features moves with all the sudden warmth and intensity of a fire upon brush, flickering at the edges and hungry for more kindling. The burning tongues of it slip between her lips and graze every one of Duck’s nerves as she agrees, “There is nowhere I would rather be.”


	4. Trust

There’s no official date that marks having been in the rainforest for half a year, since the hundred or so volunteers on staff all arrived at various times across the gap of a few weeks. But Juno makes an offhand comment about how long they’ve been at it over dinner, and the crew, as they’ve proven themselves wont to do, take off running with the idea that it’s a milestone to be celebrated. Several take a day trip into the nearest town and come back with a truckful of foreign alcohol and mysterious snacks for sampling. Erik rigs up a laptop with music and tosses several travel speakers into a bowl to amplify their volume. The two French volunteers Duck still hasn’t gotten a name on cut paper snowflakes out of newspaper pages, which are wholly inappropriate in the middle of a tropical jungle, but add a touch of festivity to the campground when strung up between buildings nonetheless. Juno permits the collection of brush for small fire in the middle of the field, but only under threat of death should it grow beyond the confines of its carefully-dug pit and steel barrel wall. 

Minerva, unsurprisingly, is having a blast with the whole endeavour. She’s been bouncing around camp all day, her usual routine disregarded in order to help maneuver picnic tables and lift the heavy cooking pots the kitchen staff are filling with a supper fit for the occasion. She’s easily the strongest person on staff (something the powerlifter Markus had taken issue with for their first few weeks), and certainly one of the tallest, so has either been roped into or volunteered for the majority of the slapdash renovation. 

The other campers are delighted to have both her aid and her company, and the morning air rings with their praises. Her over-the-top energy and enthusiasm have made her name familiar to everyone in the organization, though her appearance certainly hasn’t hurt in making her memorable – Duck and Juno have been having an ongoing laugh at the baffled expressions they get when someone whispers their certainty that Minerva is some sort of alien and they affirm it outright.

“Absolutely is,” Duck says, taking a bite out of a hash someone’s slapped together with the prior day’s leftovers, and the other volunteers never fail to squint at him, lost for the true joke. “Grew up on Miralaviniax Orbital Body Five.”

“Real funny, Newton,” someone replies, rolling their eyes. “Where’s she from, really? Tough gal with tattoos like that? Maybe she’s from Chicago.”

Minerva has made an icon of herself with her actions, but she’s made friends mostly thanks to her wild personality. She’s bonded especially with the other foreigners, those people that grew up outside of the Americas and are totally out of their element. Some of the folks with smaller English vocabularies have started picking up the language from her – it makes sense given the clear enunciating she does, but Duck’s groaned into his hat on more than one occasion after hearing another volunteer refer to him by his given name. 

“Call me Duck,” he always corrects, and never follows up when they ask why Minerva is the only one who’s allowed to call him ‘Wayne’.

Minerva seems absolutely aglow in the company and attention of the people around her. Duck is happy for her, and happy to watch her, though he turns down her insistent tugging when she tries to rope him into the work with a chuckle and assertion of his rank. She seems to get a special kind of entertainment out of those battles, always leaving with a grin and a teasing, “I will let the hero rest, then!”

Duck looks up from the letter he’s writing to Amnesty Lodge (and Aubrey, always Aubrey – Mama has a veritable stack of letters for the kid packed away in case they find a way back to Earth before he returns) and winks at her after one such exchange. Minerva stumbles in her backtracking – she saves the movement with some kind of breakdance-like spin on one hand, and another volunteer whoops at the sight, but Duck sees the fumble for what it is – and a strange giggle tumbles out of her as she catches Duck’s eye. They don’t speak again until she’s collapsed at one of the dining tables for a late lunch, when she excitedly explains what she and the team have constructed in the zone between the basecamp and the forest.

They’ve done a number on the place, that’s for sure. It radiates charm like the home of a grandparent decked out in their grandchildren's art – haphazard and a little ugly, but inviting. Volunteers bring out treats they’ve hidden away or been sent from home, and share them among the crowd. Playlists are plugged from individual phones onto Erik’s battered pink laptop with painstaking diligence. Michel somehow smuggled a tiny bottle of bitters from home, which the bolder members of the crowd sample for laughs; Antoni and Harvey haul huge bottles of cachaça out of the back of one of the trucks and set them on the designated drink table, where Anja has designated herself the bartender. She flips the bottles around in her concocting just to show off, and only breaks one when someone rips the cord of a chainsaw in the parking lot and startles her.

Juno gives the crowd a stern warning of, “No dying, no fucking, and don’t anyone get us in shit with the law,” and lets the plastic mouthpeice of the megaphone she’s holding drop for emphasis. It bounces on its cord as she climbs down off the picnic table she’s been using for a soap box and takes a swig of her drink. The crowd cheers, and Duck finds himself caught up in the energy, so he yells too.

Duck’s gained a bit of notoriety for his standout name and affiliation with the leader of the camp, to say nothing of his friendship with the resident alien, but he’s still surprised when he’s drawn into a game of cards at one of the side tables and treated like a friend. Someone keeps handing him new bottles as he empties out his drinks, but he’s much slower consuming them than a younger Duck would be, and certainly not drunk enough to join in with the ridiculous dancing some of the crew get doing as the sun starts to set. Their movement kicks an army of bugs out of the grass, and the tiny creatures are haloed in the red-gold light of dusk as they rise to fight back. Minerva drags Juno and a handful of other people into the fray, because she takes her role as the life of the party seriously, and her attempts at bringing Duck into the mix don’t stop just because he’s uncompromising.

“You will dance yet, Wayne Newton!” she promises, when he once again brushes off her hand and sinks defiantly deeper into his lawn chair. She dashes back into the mix and takes no time at all making a fool of herself to the bright synth of the 80s pop beat Erik has playing. Duck smiles over the rim of his glass as he watches her, relishing in the bubbling happiness in his stomach.

That’s the wildest part of this whole endeavour, of course – not the fact that he’s managed to stay here and stick out the downpours and flooding, the incessant flies and mediocre food, and the shared dorms with snoring strangers – but that he’s happy despite and because of it all. Duck doesn’t know that he’s ever been able to hold on to this sort of tangible joy before. The times between dangerous assaults on his life in Kepler, when he was able to shoot the shit with Aubrey and Ned and the sylphs at the Lodge, was the closest to it, short of some far-off childhood memory. Duck’s spent so much of his life running away from the looming shadow of obligation that nothing good ever felt like it was sticking. Every corner had the demand of a greater destiny behind it, and every moment of contentment was soon snatched away by change or danger or badly-spoken lies. 

He has to imagine, watching Minerva spring through the group of dancers, her arms thrown wide and head towering above most of the rest, that she’s had her fair share of difficulties too. She’s effectively a refugee, as the sole survivor of a doomed planet. She’s also a war criminal, forced into action by the coercion of a foreign antagonist. She doesn’t talk about her life often, and understandably so, but Duck has to wonder sometimes what sorts of things she’s dealt with, and what worries she’s finally been able to shuck off her back. 

Minerva dances like nothing he’s ever seen before, and after a while, Duck’s sure she’s showing off. There’s a lot of skip-kicking involved in her movement, and a fair number of quick squats that have her jumping onto her toes; the nearby dancers all cheer appreciatively when she flips onto her hands and arcs her back into a frankly absurd show of strength. He has to assume they’re all moves she learned once upon a time on Five, sometime long before the war that tore it apart. 

She glances his way when her feet once again meet the ground, and beams when he raises his bottle in a toast towards her.

The sun drifts lower on the horizon, and eventually dips away behind the dark silhouette of the distant mountain range and its shawl of clouds. Duck tugs himself out of his comfy spot to make sure no one starts a blaze in the forest with the campfire they're trying to light. He walks Jerry through the proper way to make up a tower of kindling, and waits until he’s sure the thing’s burning well before packing the lighters away. Juno, meanwhile, makes another loud announcement of, “No fucking smoking, I don’t care where you got them cigarettes, I will fire your ass in a second if I see another one of those lit,” and the group playfully boos the fellow who thought the choice appropriate. Even thousands of miles from home, some things have failed to change – the two of them remain forest rangers at heart.

Duck’s gone through what’s probably a six pack of Brazilian something-or-other before Minerva finally drags him into the dancing ring, but by this point the vast majority of the volunteers are either wasted or likewise dancing, so he’s less uncomfortable with following the trend. His absolutely godawful dance moves aren’t even the worst he can see – one of the Norwegian fellows is strutting like some kind of bird, his long legs thrown out in front of him with each beat of the song. Minerva seems absolutely delighted by the mess of action around her, her grin dazzling even in the low light. 

“Duck Newton!” she shouts to his ringing ears, one hand thrown in his direction as if she’s presenting him for show. “The time of your dance approaches! Demonstrate for us your plan of attack!”

The Duck who first met her would have long since hidden by the drink table or gone to bed, tired with the socializing and noise. The Duck he was in Kepler would have frozen in mortification and bumbled out some kind of excuse to escape. The Duck he realizes he’s become hears the plea for comedy in Minerva’s voice, is struck by the way her sharp blue eyes fixate on him, and decides he’s alright with making an absolute buffoon of himself.

He does his best approximation of pop-and-locking, wiggles his arms in an embarrassing attempt at a wave, and finishes his moveset just off beat with a dab, and Minerva absolutely _howls_ with laughter.

Duck's heart does a somersault in his chest, and heat blooms feverishly across his neck and shoulders, even as he rises smiling. Several of the nearby volunteers clap him on the back and try to mimic his dance, though most of them do it better; one woman just repeatedly dabs with alternating arms, which makes her look a bit like she’s trying to dig a hole in the air. Minerva picks herself up from where she’s bent over with her hands pressed to her chest, struggling for breath, and rushes him. Her hands scoop under his knees and lift him easily. Duck yelps as he nearly pitches over her shoulders, but she refuses to let him fall. He can just hear her wheezing giggles over the bassline as she spins them both in a clumsy circle. 

“That was wonderful!” Minerva cheers, stumbling as she sets him down again. Her cheeks are glowing with warmth, and the lines of sweat tracing down the dip of her sternum glitter in the firelight. Duck’s palms are clammy even within the sweltering heat of the swarm and the humid night, and he can’t help noticing the way his skin sticks to hers as he fumbles to put more than a hair’s breadth of distance between their heaving chests. “You are wonderful, Wayne Newton.”

Duck grows stiff in the wash of the compliment, thankful his nervous laugh is swallowed up by the cacophony around them. Minerva plucks at the front of her shirt and gives it a shake to cool herself, and rises to her full height to survey the mess of bodies around them. She grins at him, announcing, “I have lost our friends in the melee, but I will dance my way back to them!”

“I’m gonna take a breather,” Duck says, holding his hands up in a plea for escape. Minerva, still all smiles, nods, and seems to lean towards him for a split second before catching herself and pivoting back into the crowd.

Duck needs more than a breather. Duck needs an entire reassessment of his understanding of everything, because his heart is hammering against his ribs with the enthusiasm of a team of xylophone players, and the blush that’s washed across his upper body is slowly charring his ears and cheekbones. He weaves his way back out of the crowd distractedly, towards the glowing fort of lanterns that makes up the drink table. Anja spreads her arms over the mix of bottles and cups that make up her apothecary and shouts, “Pick your poison!” but Duck decides that more alcohol is perhaps not the best companion to his already spinning thoughts, and takes a coffee cup filled with water instead.

He makes a break for the backside of the growhouse, where the hum of the solar-powered fans muffle the music just slightly, and where he can safely sink into a shadow that the firelight in the center of the camp skims by. Duck throws back half his water in desperate gulps. He clutches the cup to his chest as he shakily exhales, and pushes his sweaty hair back from his forehead.

He isn’t an idiot. He knows what the pounding of his heart is about, and it’s not something he can blame on a sedentary lifestyle or a disconnect from his Chosen powers. The spotting heat across Duck’s face and neck aren’t his childhood asthma acting up. He’d like to blame the squirming of his guts on the foreign alcohol, but whatever Anja has been uncapping for him is either watered down or too weak to have much of an effect on his burly frame. Duck leans his head back against the wall of the building and groans into the quiet night beyond the rowdy party, fully aware that he’s already head over heels into an emotional pool he’d be happy to drown in.

And the worst – the best? – part is the complete peace that washes over him the moment he accepts the truth. Duck can close his eyes and still pick out her voice with perfect clarity amongst the cheering crowd and despite the music, and the ghost of her hands is still tingling behind his knees. The thrill of being lifted into the air still has him on weak legs.

“God fucking damn it, Duck,” he groans, beating his head softly against the brick. It just figures that for the twenty years he’d spent avoiding everything to do with Minerva, she’d find a way to make herself an absolutely permanent fixture in his heart.

He’s allowed all of ten minutes of time to come to terms with his new state of crisis before the crunch of approaching heavy footsteps stirs his solitude. Duck tilts his head just as Minerva appears around the side of the building, framed with a cape of flickering firelight. She calls his name, and despite every frightened nerve in his body telling him to keep quiet, he can’t help but reply.

There’s less certainty in her step as she bounds towards him, and the seat she takes beside him rocks backwards as her momentum carries her farther than anticipated, but Minerva eventually nestles down at his side like she was meant to be there. The noise of the party becomes muffled as she pants away a laugh and grins at him. She’s radiating the warmth of proximity and exertion, and Duck can’t help watching the deep inhales of her broad chest. The outline of her breasts are sharp through the fabric of her damp shirt, and the sweat on her skin shimmers in the faint light. She lays a leg long against his, and he can feel the muscles of her thigh quivering from use.

“A gift, Wayne Newton!” she exclaims breathlessly, handing him the remainder of an alcohol bottle he can’t read the label of. Duck peers suspiciously into the neck of it and gives it an experimental sniff before gulping the leftovers, and places the bottle against the building as the sweet burn prickles its way down his throat. 

“Ugh, that’s terrible.”

“It’s not the worst I’ve had!” Minerva laughs, tilting her head back to rest against the brick wall. She props her arm on her raised knee, and Duck realizes that he’s opened a floodgate by accepting his attraction to her – all he can do now is trace the thick cords of her shoulder muscles and the pulse pounding a beat against the long arc of her throat. He’s hyperaware of the space she takes up, dark and imposing as a shadow made solid. “I have not had so much fun since I was a youth! You should have seen, Wayne, there was a circle made of the crowd, and we fought valiant battles of dance within it! I am not sure who won, but I gave forth my best effort!”

“Good thing I tapped out, huh?” Duck can't help the smile that blooms over his face, and it only grows as Minerva scrunches up giggling. 

“You would be a most dangerous opponent, I agree! I would gladly watch you dance again!”

“Hell no, Minnie, you’ve gotta commit that last dance to memory. I don’t do repeat performances.”

“This is a tragedy!” she laments, throwing her head back as the bubbling laughter coming out of her becomes too powerful to contain. Minerva’s shoulders shake as she arcs up towards the starry sky, and she presses a desperate palm to her sternum in a vain attempt to press the amusement back down. The relieved rush of breath she makes when she composes herself sends the hair on Duck’s neck rising. She turns to him with glittering eyes, and it takes everything he has not to reach out and touch her. Instead he unfolds the half-empty cup of water from his hands and holds it out. She gulps it down immediately. 

“Gimmie that back and I’ll grab us some more water,” Duck says, rising to one knee and gesturing for its return. He’s ready to take another six ‘breathers’ and maybe a steadying shot of something very potent. It isn’t the mug that returns to his grip, though. Minerva’s palm folds into his instead, and the tangle of their fingers is uncoordinated but so, so warm.

“Wayne Newton,” she says, suddenly deflated, blinking at him through long eyelashes and slowly towing him closer as her arm relaxes, “I must tell you something.”

Duck nods, too frozen to do anything else. She smiles at him, and he dares to believe the expression is affectionate.

“I am so… I am delighted to be here. I did not know what I would find in this place, but I trusted I could follow you anywhere and find some purpose. And I was not wrong! But I have found–” she squeezes his hand, “–such joy, and that I did not expect. You– you are so _important_ to me.”

“You–” he breathes, unable to think clearly, “You too.”

Minerva shakes her head, and gathers his hand in both of hers, tugging it close enough to fold over. The bridge of her nose bumps his knuckles as she presses their intertwined fingers to her forehead; the heat of her breath cascades across his wrist.

“I lost track of the years, and lost my sense, my– my _self_ in the rubble of Five. I believed peace to be something long out of my reach. But for as long as I have known you, Wayne Newton, you have been upsetting everything I have thought to be true. I would not know this happiness if I had not chosen you, and– and I would choose you twice over, if I were given the option.” She pauses just long enough for Duck to remember he needs to fill his lungs, but he fails the task when her lips brush his fingers. Her forehead crinkles against his skin. Minerva inhales slowly, as if afraid of what the exhale will do. “But I feel it is something I should not say.”

“What is?”

Minerva lifts her head suddenly, and Duck can’t help but gawk, as close as they are, and as face to face as they are. The heat across his neck and ears is making him sweat, yet the piercing, still gaze of Minerva’s blue eyes is sending waves of nervous cold through the valves of his heart. She doesn’t move, nor back down from their staring contest, but the full curves of her lips twitch, as if fidgeting with words she hasn’t yet said. They part the slightest bit, just enough that Duck’s eyes are drawn away, down to the where the tip of her tongue is posed to speak.

“I wish to kiss you, Wayne Newton,” she says, in the softest, most desperate voice.

The world goes silent under the white noise of Duck’s shock, but he manages a faint rasp of, “Yeah?”

Minerva lunges forward, her hand latching onto the side of his face like it was formed to be there. She tilts her head barely enough to make room for their noses; the broad shape of hers presses into his cheekbone just before her lips meet his. The cushioning immediately gives way to a jarring clack as their teeth crash together, and Duck reels backwards with his palms clapped over his jaw.

“Aw, Christ!” he curses, firmly rubbing to numb the pain even as spurts of laughter falls out between his fingers. “Fuck, Minnie, go easy, man, I’m tough, but I’m not–”

Palms press to his cheekbones, thumbs hook around his ears, and fingertips skid through his overgrown hair as Minerva hauls him back in again. Her mouth surges forward to find him with all the gentleness of a tidal wave, and she pulls him into her like a deep, patient undercurrent, inescapable and hungry. Duck has always been most kindred with the slow, docile energy of the forest, but the woman he’s fallen for is like a torrential flood, sudden and nourishing and devastating to him all at once.

They kiss like doing so was inevitable, as preordained as Beacon’s fate against Reconciliation. Minerva dives for his lips each time he gasps for air, relentlessly drowning him in the taste of her. Duck’s heartbeat pounds loudly in his ears, a violent rhythm against the warmth of her fingers. He stumbles forward, one hand pushing against the wall in a battle to keep himself somewhat upright. The other finds purchase along Minerva’s side, and the skid of his trembling fingers against her ribs makes her gasp. The distraction has her chin ducking backward, and Duck takes the opportunity to turn the metaphorical tide by rushing after her. She moans loudly as her recaptures her mouth, and the sound sends a fresh wave of heat blooming across his face. 

There’s a soft thunk as the cup falls out of her lap and rolls onto the grass.

Minerva’s legs shift, pushing against the ground to prop herself more upright; her fingertips run lines across Duck’s scalp when she fails to relinquish him in her adjustment, and a long shudder works its way up his spine as her blunt nails meet the nape of his neck. He surges forward as her fingertips dig into his skin, and he can feel her gasping between kisses, squirming under his assault like she’s trying to retreat and meet him all at once.

Duck isn’t surprised she’s loud, but he’d underestimated the effect her sounds would have on him. He pushes his cheek against Minerva’s so they can both pause to heave for oxygen, and the soft keening she does with each exhale nearly makes him collapse. He runs a shaking palm across the sliver of hipbone he’s found under her shirt, and her skin is riddled with goosebumps. When he tilts down the bare half inch to bite softly at her lip, she leans the slightest bit away.

“Wayne.” She breathes his name like it’s a stuck to her tongue. Her eyes are scrunched tightly. Her fingers are trembling against his jaw. “You must swear you mean this honestly.”

Duck backs up just enough to properly look at her.

“Aw jeeze, honey,” he whispers, his heart aching at the fear in her coiled posture. He’s never seen Minerva look so small. Duck traces the sharp angle of her cheekbone with his thumb like he’s frantically trying to wipe the terror away, smudging her skin with more and more force until she finally blinks up at him. “Of course I– of _course _I do.”

He shuffles himself into a better center of balance, and the hand freed from holding him upright cups the other side of her face. Minerva slouches into his touch, her own fingers skidding down and curling around his collarbone. There’s a deep furrow to her forehead, and Duck wants so desperately to kiss away the tremor that rattles her full lips every time she exhales. The blue of her eyes is vibrant even in the darkness, and her pupils blown wide with emotion; they flick between his own quickly, searching for something Duck can’t put the words to.

He pulls her in gently and presses their foreheads together, just as she’s done to him so many times before. Minerva collapses into the contact like a dying star, falling loose in his grip, and relief cascades down her body to loosen every stiff line and clenched muscle. Her palm presses over his chest, and Duck could swear he feels the heavy thump of her heartbeat sync with his.

It might be the first time they’ve been in absolute agreement about something.

When she tilts her head down to kiss him again, there’s no hesitation to the movement; Minerva’s hands run possessive patterns over his chest and neck and drag him into her warmth unabashedly. Duck’s entire body catches fire as she takes advantage of his groan to slip her tongue into his mouth. The energy between them all at once surges back from a smoldering ember to a raging inferno, and it’s all Duck can do to keep from burning alive when she sighs his name and hauls him into close proximity, her entire body arching forward to meet him. 

She’s an inescapable cage of strong limbs and electricity, and her broad palms go wild with the permission he’s given her to touch. The muscles of her stomach twitch as Duck skids his palms under her shirt, testing where the hard curves of her abdominal muscles blend into the soft fat at the top of her thighs. He barely bites down a moan when Minerva grips his waist with iron fingers, sure he’ll find bruises there tomorrow. She hauls him across her lap at some point, and Duck finds with some surprise that he’s very much into the feeling of straddling her hips. He starts memorizing the gentle points of her ears with his thumbs, and consumes each moan the sensation draws out of her like he’s been starving for the sound. With each heaving break for air, they end up pressed together again, leaning into each other’s strength and wheezing with laughter.

It’s a sudden squall of rain that finally wakes them from their hazy cloud of intimacy and back into the reality of the night, and it demands they both finally and completely catch their breath. Duck peppers soft kisses across Minerva’s nose as it scrunches up in the surprise deluge of water. She curls into his neck, her hands warm and shaking on his back, and giggles with a tender sort of delight as the downpour runs cool streaks over their sweaty skin.

Duck presses a firm kiss to her ear. He’s stupefied with affection, and feels drowsy with the weight of the realization that somehow the clusterfuck of their two absurd lives has amounted to making out like teenagers in the Amazon fucking rainforest. Call him a pessimist, but being forty-two and shy as hell, Duck had rather committed to going through the motions of daily mundane life solo until he finally just kicked it. Minerva fits into his arms like she was built to be there, though, and he supposes this is a natural accumulation of two decades saying “You’re stuck with me.”

“What d’y’think, Minnie?” he asks eventually, his throat rattling like he’s swallowed gravel. The music has long since stopped, and the only sounds from camp now are odd echoing conversation, the clattering of moving dishware, and the crunch of footsteps in the dampening earth. A door creaks at one of the bunkhouses. Minerva breathes slowly against his throat, in a deep, laborious way that suggests she’s victim to the siren song of sleep. “Party’s over. Should we pack this in?”

“I would take you with me,” she hums, and the vibration against his skin sends a ripple of goosebumps across Duck’s chest. He takes a second to calm the part of his brain that jumps at the idea, and shakes his head.

“Juno would murder us. Minerva, she would beat us to actual death with a shovel and throw our bodies in the river. Much as I want to– I mean, yes, stick a fucking pin in that, yes, but not on a single-person cot in a room full of sleeping people.”

“Perhaps when the volunteers are out working the fields,” she suggests, smile curling against his jaw, and Duck swallows thickly at the idea.

“You’re gonna get us fired,” he groans, pressing his flushed face into Minerva’s temple. She cackles with laughter, and hugs him close as he joins in. 

Clambering to their feet is, to put it lightly, an enormous effort. There’s a whole detangling of limbs involved, and Duck’s knees have gone stiff, and Minerva’s already wobbly on her feet from the copious amounts of alcohol she’s had and the hours of dancing. She cites her warrior’s stamina as the main reason why she’s able to maintain any semblance of balance, but Duck has reason to believe that it’s the steady grip they keep on each other’s hands that keeps them from falling over as they stumble across the now-abandoned lawn and towards the womens’ bunkhouse. 

They stop just outside the door, because Duck isn’t willing to follow her in and give any watchful eyes reason to get him written up. He’s supposed to be some kind of authority figure in this program, and sneaking into the ladies’ cabin in the middle of the night is all kinds of unacceptable. Minerva leans back against the stone wall by the door and tugs him into her arms, and despite the nervous shiver that runs down Duck’s back at the realization that literally anyone could open the door and spot them, he can’t find it in him to make a fuss. She leans down to kiss him, and Duck’s nerves trickle out of his brain like heated wax.

Minerva murmurs something in her native language as she breaks away, and his name sticks out of the rolling sentence like a thorn along the stem of a rose. Duck chases after the words to kiss her again.

“You’ll have to teach me some of that,” he hums, tracing her jaw with his knuckles, and Minerva blinks at him in confusion. “We both know I’m a shit student, but it’s only fair, what with you learning to write. Gimmie some curse words to play with or somethin’.” 

He doesn’t expect the gloss of water that builds over Minerva’s eyes, nor the reverent way she shoves her hands through his hair and pulls his jaw up to her like he’s some kind of chalice she’s desperate to drink from. Her teeth find his lower lip and slowly pull at it, as if she’s sealing the promise between them. Duck groans under his breath as she releases him, and their noses brush in the close proximity, still tangled up together.

“Duck Newton,” she hums, her eyes closed and struggle clear across her features, “If I do not release you now we will have to flee Supervisor Juno Divine in the morning.”

The choked laughter that explodes out of Duck’s lungs echoes through the still air, and he and Minerva both jump to cover his mouth and stop the sound before it can do further damage. The burbling amusement they’re both fighting down forces broad grins onto both their faces; Duck fumbles backwards and gestures wildly for her to go into the cabin, and races to make himself scarce. He bends over with his fist to his mouth halfway to his own bunkhouse, snickering. 

Duck Newton is absolutely stupid with happiness, and can’t find a sliver of cynicism in him to worry the feeling away.

The emotion mows him down again the next morning, when he blinks awake to the groaning and shuffling of the seven other people who share his living space. Somebody across the room lobs a pillow and begs for silence. Someone else rushes out the door to puke. Duck lays in a mess of sheets with the brilliance of the Sylvan crystal in his heart, absolutely stunned with the realization that Minerva wants him. He mooshes his hands over his face to hide the wonder he can feel stretching his cheeks, and rises with a bounce in his step that even the nagging headache at the back of his skull can’t tamper. 

As one of the least affected volunteers on site, Duck makes the executive decision to play medic. He sets several percolators and kettles up on the countertop of the shared kitchen building, and lays out a small fleet of mugs with spoons and sugar ready beside. The scent of brewing coffee summons the horde – coworkers slog in and out with various squinty expressions of relief and thanks on their slurred tongues within minutes. Juno lays her head on his shoulder with a grunt when she stumbles in. 

“You’re a hero of the people, Duck,” she says as he hands her thermos back, full to the top with the darkest brew they have on hand. The slurp she takes is loud and gratuitous, and probably scalds her throat the whole way down. “Remind me next time someone gets the idea that parties are now off limits forever.”

“Sounds like you had a great time,” Duck shrugs, crouching to hunt the lower cabinets for more cups. Juno flops herself down onto one of the benches that line the walls, and she sets down the reusable plastic waterbottle she’s already emptied of fluid. Her head falls back to rest against the hideously-stained stucco, and the tinted sunglasses she’s flipped over her eyes reflect the rays of sunlight streaming through the windows as shattered rainbows.

“Oh sure, danced like it was ‘99, and now my hips have given up all function and I have a splitting headache the size of the Grand Canyon. I have to take loud idiots and chainsaws into the woods today, Duck, what was I thinking?”

“That you deserve a break,” he sighs, and slides a newly-percolated mug of coffee onto her table, certain she’ll need it with the way she’s chugging her first. “Where you headed today, the B site?”

“Uh-huh. Quarter mile of brush and trash to clear out before we can start planting anything. Soil samples to do, shit to survey. So many chainsaws, Duck.”

“Lemme take it off your hands.” Juno sits up in her chair at the offer, only to fold her hands over her temples and groan at the sudden movement. With quotas to fill and a schedule to keep, even a night of hard partying can’t keep the volunteers from doing the work they signed up for – Duck’s holding out okay, by all counts, and even before the hangover Juno was well overdue for a day off.

“I will actually beg you,” she concedes, and Duck chuckles at her pathetic state. He’s just about to tell her to eat something greasy and climb back into bed when Minerva comes stumbling into the room, likewise looking worse for wear.

There’s a droop to her eyelids and a crease between her eyebrows that folds her tattoos up, and her usual proud posture is hunched forward. The bright orange tee shirt she’s wearing has ‘Seed The Future’ emblazoned at the front in a bubbly font, and one of the sleeves she’s rolled up over her shoulders is coming undone. Duck hasn’t seen her so dishevelled in all the time he’s known her, even for the short while she was bunking at his apartment in Kepler. Watching Minerva shuffle into the building on the hunt for coffee like every other average joe here is barely a step away from hilarious, and Duck’s heart swells at the sight. 

“Hey, honey,” he grins, and when she spots him she lights up just the same. 

Juno is on her feet in an instant, her chair screeching as she shoves it back, and the sound is all Duck gets as warning before her empty waterbottle bounces off his arm and clatters across the floor. She marches towards him with near-murderous intent, stooping to pick up the projectile and then beating him with it as soon as she’s within reaching distance. 

“About! Fucking! Time! Duck! Newton!” she shouts between each whack, incredulous laughter in each word, and Duck swats a hand at the bottle as he winces away. Juno is relentless, even when she turns to look at Minerva over her shoulder. She hangs on to Duck using a fistful of his shirt and continues to clock him over the head. “Minerva, let me apologise on behalf of this absolute dingus. I’ve been watching him make goo-goo eyes at you for months. I’m so glad he actually got his shit together and said something.”

“She’s joking,” Duck tries to explain, covering his head as the assault continues. Minerva looks torn between amusement and alarm. 

“Oh no, I’m real serious. I can’t believe you’ve agreed to put up with this guy. Duck can be a real piece of garbage with talking to people, especially when it’s important. Can’t! You! Duck?!”

“I think he is incredible,” Minerva says, her hands held out placatingly, and Juno drops the onslaught to squint at her. She slouches with a loud groan of defeat. 

“Lord help me, you’re both terrible. I’m going to have to keep you separated, aren’t I?” She gives Duck’s shoulder one last halfhearted wallop before returning to the table for a long, bracing swig of her coffee. Juno hooks an arm into Minerva’s as she makes for the door. “C’mon, you can help me whip up something unhealthy for breakfast. I need painkillers and grease and the details of how this played out.”

“Of course,” Minerva concedes, grinning sympathetically at Duck from across the room as he unfurls and scrubs the tender spots on his head. He turns back to the counter to ready a mug for her, sure that her normal aversion to the flavour of coffee will be overturned by her headache. “But I would like to–”

“Oh yeah, girl, get you some caffeine, it’ll help,” Juno allows. But when Minerva reaches the counter and extends a hand for the drink coming her way, she feints slightly to one side, and hooks her fingers instead behind Duck’s neck. She hauls him in with just enough caution to keep the hot liquid from spilling, and her lips capture his like a firm promise, slow and deep. 

Minerva smiles playfully as she pulls back. Juno groans from the doorway as Duck’s face floods with colour; he turns shyly towards the counter as she mutters, “Oh my god, I hate this. I love this and I hate this. You’re obligated to take the chainsaw shift now, Duck, it’s the least you can do if I’m gonna be putting up with your canoodling.”

Duck raises a hand in an acknowledging wave as she and Minerva leave, then promptly leans his arms on the countertop and buries his grin in his hands. 


	5. Grow

Duck’s heart clenches up like a fist when the Cryptonomica comes into view. The paint is chipping on the face of the building and the signs out front have started fading in the sun. There are several vehicles parked out front, and their rental car is the last to struggle for parking space. Their flights had been delayed and they’d detoured to drop Juno off at her parents’ place, so the timing isn’t their fault, but still – silhouettes of the people inside are hardly distinguishable from each other, suggesting things are about to pop off and they’re nearly late for the party. 

Duck’s only just made it through the doorway when friends are upon him, arms patting his and thrown over his shoulders in greeting, and the warmth of their affection wraps around him like a blanket. These people are familiar in a way the volunteer crowd in the rainforest isn’t, and the wave of what would normally be jarring contact is soothing instead. Minerva barrels towards the other two Chosen just as a flash of red curls bounds towards Duck from the back of the room, and he opens his arms for Aubrey reflexively. They’ve never been particularly huggy with each other, but any discomfort at the action is solidly overrun by the elation of reunion. She slams into him at a run, knocking the breath from his lungs.

“Hey, Aubrey,” he hears himself saying, muffled in her shoulder and throat tight. She feels thinner in his arms, more spindly and taller and stronger than before, and the scent of her shampoo is sharp and overwhelming. She squeezes him tighter and he returns the favour, laughter and ache turning his voice wobbly. “Hey, sweetheart, hey, hey.”

“I can’t believe you wrote me letters, Duck, you’re such an old man,” Aubrey barks, but refuses to let him go. She rocks their embrace back and forth with an enthusiasm he forgot she possessed. "Mama brought them to me when we tested the portal yesterday and I read every single one of them twice and I want you to tell me all of the stories again in person because I’m losing my mind. I found out you were dating Minerva _from _Minerva, Duck, I didn’t even know she could write and then I find this letter inside your letter that _she_ wrote–”

It’s so damn good to see her. Duck can’t even find it in himself to grow tired of her rapidfire commentary, or weary of the express revisitation tour she tugs him into. They march a winding loop around the room so he can greet every Sylvan and Keplerian in attendance, and is surprised with a much shorter but equally warm hug from Mama when Aubrey announces his return. 

Being back in Kepler is unsettling, for the first little while. The chaotic gathering is as prickly as it is calming, because a voice in the back of Duck’s mind keeps suggesting that being in the presence of the former Pine Guard is going to haul him against his will into a new quest for destiny. He buries the idea under the powerful distraction of his friends’ antics, and then under the finality of loss that watching the unaired Saturday Night Dead tape lodges into his heart. Aubrey clambers over the crowd from her spot in the middle of the room shortly after Ned’s intro, and parks herself tightly against Duck’s side. He’s awkward in returning the favour when she wraps her arms around his middle and resolutely stares down the television with teary eyes, but loops an elbow over her shoulders anyway. He pillows his cheek on her curls, Aubrey snorts at the screen, and affection joins the pile of emotion that eventually smothers the discomfort out of his brain.

The group moves from the chaotic decor of the Cryptonomica to the Amnesty Lodge, when the sun has long since set and the hours grow late. Mama gives Duck a knowing smile when she hands him the keys to one of the double suites at the far end of the building, and tells them to “go easy on the bed, it wasn’t built with strong folks like you in mind”. Minerva seems unbothered; Duck’s face burns like a hot iron. He grumbles the entire way down the hall, his eyes trained on the worn floorboards.

It's a strange experience, though, setting his things down in a room with a single bed and knowing it's Minerva he'll be sharing it with. For as much time as they've snuck away together at the volunteer campsite, they haven't had a space to themselves for any nighttime activity, rest or otherwise. The closest to it was the nap Duck took on the plane ride to Kepler, slouching into her shoulder from across the split between their seats. Minerva seems to have the same thought, and grins shyly at him from the side of the mattress she's sitting on. 

They resurface from the quiet of their room before long, drawn by the conversation echoing from the great room, where a fire has been lit and a rich stew is being shared. Duck finds himself a rocking chair to lounge in, and sips (bad) coffee while Aubrey and Dani regale the crowd with stories of their adventures in restoring Sylvain. Aubrey is the primary performer, to no surprise, hopping to her feet every other moment to paint a picture with her gestures. Dani chips in through peals of fond laughter to expand on topics Aubrey’s gotten distracted from. Janelle adds a calmer commentary to the storytelling from her blanket nest on the couch, when she feels both girls have skimmed over something remarkable.

They all stay up much later than they should, fueled by excitement and the desire to stay within each others’ presence. Dani curls up on Janelle’s shoulder partway through a tale about pudding trees, and by the time the conversation has muted down to a simmer and Thacker is leading the charge, half the room is nodding off. Minerva, slurping whipped cream off her fifth hot chocolate, seems the least affected by the late hour. She’s likely the most enthralled audience Thacker has ever had, and he’s beyond enthusiastic about her attention, though his stories are repeatedly cut off with his own giant yawns. He’s the fellow who finally makes the call for bedtime, after Minerva goes looking for another drink and finds Barclay passed out against the serving countertop that links the kitchen with the main room. Duck helps jostle everyone into enough wakefulness to drag themselves to their rooms; Aubrey squeezes his arm before she and Dani stumble off hand in hand, and has him promise to still be there in the morning.

Duck is unequivocally ready to crash. Months of reforestation work has given him the stamina for long hours of physical exertion, but the emotional drain of seeing his second family again has wrung his brain like a sponge. He still wanders down the hall with much more grace than the rest of the crowd – too many pranks at the campsite have taught him to maintain composure until he’s sure he’s safe to relax. He shrugs off his shirt as soon as he’s nudged the wooden door of their room open, and starts fishing through his bag for sleepwear and his toothbrush. Minerva sits quietly on the edge of the mattress, staring out the window at the forest. 

“Everythin’ okay, honey?” he asks, glancing repeatedly up at her as he untangles the wads of cloth in his hastily-packed bag. Her stillness is always unsettling – it’s something that remains alien even after all the time he’s known her. Minerva is able to go as rigid as a statue, breath so faint it’s undetectable, unblinking for so long her bright eyes start looking like gemstones embedded in an obsidian face. She doesn’t seem to register his voice immediately.

“It has been good to see our friends again, Duck,” she says, and smiles faintly. “They seem well.”

“Yeah, they’re doin’ alright, seems like. I think you made Thacker’s day by hanging on to his every word.”

“I have neither hung onto words nor constructed a day. I am not sure how such things could be done.” Minerva frowns, finally turning to face him. “Are these idioms?”

“Mm-hmm. Means you made him happy ‘cause you paid attention to him.” Minerva isn’t usually deterred from conversation just because Duck has a toothbrush in his mouth, but she falls silent as he tosses their bag of toiletries into the bathroom and starts cleaning up to sleep. He trades his slacks out for the pajamas printed with rubber ducks his sister bought him for Christmas (meant as a joke but comfortable as hell), and he snatches a facecloth to wipe the dried sweat rushing through airports left on his neck. Duck scrubs a hand through his wild hair and makes a mental note to hit up the barbershop before they leave town again – lobbing his own hair off evenly had been completely impossible, and somehow amongst the hundred volunteers on staff, he’d yet to find anyone who could snip a straight line.

He turns when his partner appears in the bathroom mirror; Minerva leans into the room just far enough to kiss his cheek, still fully dressed, and then makes purposefully for the door. Duck follows her curiously, eyebrows raised. 

“I am going to the hot springs, Wayne Newton,” she smiles, and then is gone.

He can’t fault her for wanting to take advantage of the location, of course – Duck would be on board for a soak himself if he wasn’t so bone tired. He takes his time deciding which side of the bed to sleep on by rolling between them to assess the divots of use, and battles with the sheets until he has the perfect balance of reassuring weight on his shoulders and coolness on his toes. But problems arise when Duck actually tries to sleep and the silence of the Lodge settles around him. For as solitary as he’s always been, the past few years have seen him adjust to a new level of white noise in the dark. His old apartment had had the tinkling collar-bell of his cat, and for a short while, the absolute chaos of four roommates. The Amazon was perhaps noisier at night than in the day, and he’d slept in shared buildings with other volunteers the entire time. For all that it feels like a foolish reason, and try as he might, Duck can’t find a position or headspace comfortable enough to fall unconscious.

He figures, one frustrating battle with the metaphorical Sandman later (was the Sandman a Sylvan? He’d have to ask Aubrey), that the hot springs might be his best bet at growing drowsy, and should at least give him the company he apparently needs so badly. He rises to hunt for his swim trunks, and hears a disdainful scoff rattle through his head in the nauseating cadence of Beacon’s voice. 

The walk to the other side of the Lodge and out into the cold night is peaceful, since no other residents seem to be having any trouble sleeping. Duck keeps the towel he took from the bathroom tight around his shoulders as the cool wind nips at his exposed skin, and beelines for the dancing steam of the springs around the corner. He can see Minerva at the rim of the biggest pool, her arms folded on the wood planks and head pillowed in the pocket they make. He quietly kicks off his shoes and tosses his towel over them as he bends to climb into the water, only to recoil back with his hand clapped over his eyes.

“Oh for Christ’s sake, Minerva, you’re supposed to wear a swimsuit in the springs!”

“Hello, Wayne Newton,” is her immediate, cheerful response as she blinks awake. She turns to better face him, and Duck does his absolute best to avert his eyes. “What purpose does a swimsuit serve here? I am not swimming, are there are no other people. You told me previously that swimsuits were worn for modesty’s sake, and I do not think the trees are concerned for my modesty.”

“It’s a public space,” he sighs, resigned to yet another debate about local culture versus the normality of her own homeworld. The differing levels of intimacy and affection displayed in Brazil have made Minerva more confident in her arguments, and her ever-growing understanding of Earth as a whole has made her all the more amused by poking holes in Duck’s explanations. He hisses as the scalding water wraps around his ankles, and slowly starts descending into the pool. “Anybody could show up to soak while you’re here. It’s not polite.”

“Our friends were tired, and sleeping soundly. Their company is not likely.” A pleased grin pairs with her folded arms, and Minerva adds, “And of course, I am not familiar with human customs, Duck Newton. They would understand my ‘confusion’.”

A loud snort forces its way from Duck’s nose as he tries to smother his laugh. He bats a handful of water towards his partner and moves towards the perpendicular side of the square pool, conceding, “You’re terrible.”

He’s only just tipped his head back into the water and slouched into the wooden bench when Minerva marches her way towards him, apparently determined to walk through the water instead of gliding like a normal person. There’s a distortion across the surface that hides most of the details of her form, but the light markings across her dark skin catch the glow of the nearby solar lanterns just enough to suggest the shape of her. Duck catches himself tracing the long lines of blue from her collarbone down to her stomach. Minerva extends her arms to cut a path through the water, and as her breasts follow the rippling at the surface, Duck decides the best course of action for he and his burning face is to make space.

She sees it as a game, of course, when her proximity sends him darting for the other side of the pool. Minerva turns on a heel and strides in the new direction, chasing his wake, her powerful legs drawing her through the resistance with little struggle. Duck slides along the rim of the spring, tugging himself along by gripping the wood panels, and Minerva laughs as he foils her reach. They’re lapping the basin within minutes.

Duck begins to feel lightheaded with the warmth of the water and exertion, so he makes a break for the farthest corner of the pool. He swims over the middle of the spring, where the vent that pumps the water from its source is hot and bubbling, and latches onto the corner bench with a breathless chuckle.

There’s a terrible sputtering noise behind him, and then a series of loud splashes, and Duck spins around to see Minerva stumbling back from the middle of the pool, glaring at the water with wide eyes. She coughs and wipes at her nose, and backs into the edge of the spring. 

“Hey, you okay?” Duck asks, all humour dropped under the battle-ready stare his partner is wearing. He’s moonhopping his way towards her before he’s fully thought about it, concern outweighing his bashfulness at her nudity. Minerva’s eyebrows draw lower as she watches his arrival, and by the time he’s reaching for her arms she’s traded the alarm in her face for a look of indignation. 

“I am unharmed,” she says, still glaring at the rippling water behind him. 

“You sure?”

“The water was deeper than I expected.” His palms have just met the firm curves of her forearms when Minerva looks down at him. The rippling surface paints ribbons of light into the blue of her eyes, and there’s a strange expression pressed across her features – a crinkle between her brows and some sort of pout onto her lips. Duck focuses on it instead of the dramatic cut of her wide shoulders and the soft slope of her chest, both made shimmery with dampness and close enough to trace.

“You’ve used the spring before,” he says slowly, question clearly embedded in the words. Minerva glances out into the dark night and squints at the ghostly shimmering of steam in the distance, where the other two basins sit.

“Only the shallowest of the three.”

Duck may be an old hand at investigating suspicious situations, but he’s clearly out of practice, because it takes him a solid minute to make the connection between her words and the moment past. They weren’t encouraged to swim in any of the rivers of Brazil, given the chance of contracting foreign parasites or attracting dangerous wildlife. Minerva grew up on a desert planet. She’s never been to any of the town’s water parks or their one aesthetic nightmare of a public pool. He filters through what he knows of Minerva’s history and what he’s exposed her to since she came planetside, and an absolutely absurd theory forms before him.

“You know you can float in deep water, right?” he asks, and nearly chokes as her frown deepens. He mentally ticks the checkbox confirming his suspicions. “Minnie, c’mon, it isn’t even over your head.”

“I am much too heavy to float, Wayne Newton,” she says sternly, and the absolute conviction in her tone is both endearing and incredibly funny. Duck tilts his neck to hide his grin and squeezes her arms.

“No you– no way, no you aren’t. Buoyancy, Minerva. You– you’re from some crazy-advanced alien civilization, there’s no way you don’t know how physics work.” He chokes on his own giggles as he looks up, and the most amazing flush of colour blooms across Minerva’s cheeks. She stiffens under his hands.

“I am not_ simple_,” she argues, “But Miralaviniax Orbital Body Five did not _have_ large bodies of water–”

“Tell me this isn’t the first bath you’ve ever had!” Duck barely manages the words, wheezing with laughter. “C’mere, c’mon, it’s– no, c’mon, Minnie, let’s do some fuckin’– science, okay, lemme show you.” He lifts Minerva’s arms onto his shoulders, emboldened by his amusement, and steps in until they’re nearly touching. He presses his palms to the broad expanse of her ribcage, and traces the ridges down the taut muscles of her waist to the arcs of her hips, where his favourite secret layer of soft fat sits. Minerva’s forehead leans down to press against his, her arms curling carefully around his upper back. 

Duck swallows the last of his giggles and moves his hands down the sides of her legs. Her exhales are faint against his skin. His own cheeks and ears prickle with heat.

He tugs under one of her knees and draws her leg up over his hip, notching it close. As he reaches to do the same on the opposite side, Minerva tenses. Their eyes flicker back and forth with the close proximity, and he stares her down, whispering, “C’mon, trust me.”

“I do not wish to draw us both underwater,” she protests. Duck slowly starts backing up, one arm hooked around her thigh and holding tight. “Wayne Newt–”

“I’ve got’cha,” he murmurs, just as they pull too far away for Minerva’s standing leg to hold her any longer. Duck scoops her up as they glide backwards, pulling her flush against his waist, and it takes a tense moment before she seems to realize he’s supporting her just fine. Her shins carefully hook around his back, and Duck can’t help but press a kiss to her collarbone as she exhales. 

“You have grown stronger,” she says, relaxing bit by bit against his grip. 

“Yeah, I’ll take the compliment, but the water’s doing most of the work.” 

Duck walks a lazy backwards circle in the spring, counter to the current their previous fooling around had spun. The moonlight glimmers over the droplets stuck to Minerva’s body as they move, speckling her in molten silver. Her temple nudges against his as she curls into his touch. Duck has never been more conscious of his own breathing; every inhale presses the two of them closer, and the steam collecting on their chests makes every parting sticky.

“On Five,” Minerva says suddenly, and the ghost of her breath on Duck’s neck has his hair standing on end, “The ground was very porous, and absorbed rain as quickly as it arrived. Water was pumped up from the earth after the sediment had filtered the heavy metals out, and my people were allotted an amount based on their family size. We bathed using basins and cloths.”

Duck doesn’t dare speak, even to assure her he had been teasing. Minerva rarely talks about her homeworld, and the topic feels fragile – as much as he wants to know, as much as understanding where she came from might help him better understand her now, he suspects that any interruption will remove the subject from the table entirely, perhaps never to return.

“When I was very young I shared bathwater with other students of the Atraxin temple. They were greedy with it, and at the time it caused me no small amount of ire.” Minerva huffs fondly, and the bleed of emotion in her tone is so very different from the clinical way she normally approaches information about her past. Her lips brush at his neck as she slouches into his hold. “Never again will I take such companionship for granted.”

“Good while it lasted,” Duck murmurs, understanding the sentiment. For all the challenges of the time, he misses the tangled mess of events and friendships the gate to Sylvain caused. Being able to see Aubrey and Thacker and the rest of the cohort from the other side takes the edge off the melancholy, but the way they interact now just isn’t the same as it once was. Friends from back then have been lost to the vicious forward trudge of time, and no sort of goodbye could fill the hole their absence punched into his heart. He can’t even imagine the same loss multiplied thousands of times over.

Minerva leans back slowly, her back straightening and hands sliding over Duck’s shoulders. She’s the taller of the two of them, but there’s a dip in her height because of the way she’s suspended over his hips. The mottled light from the lanterns rimming the pool outline her upper body against the dark night, and highlight the defined curves of her arms. A line of condensation trickles down her chest. She stares thoughtfully down at him, and Duck nearly balks under the softness of her expression. 

“I’ve thought on what you said, many months ago – that you believed I deserved happiness. And I am… I am elated at your companionship, Wayne Newton,” she says quietly. “But I do not think I... deserve this resolution. I have been far luckier and far greater rewarded than the worth of my actions.”

“That’s not something you get to decide, though, right?” he throws back, before he’s truly thought about it. Minerva is still as he speaks, framed in the haze like some kind of goddess. “If we all chose the endings we thought we deserved, then there’d be a lot more miserable people out there. I mean, I– I’d be one of ‘em. You had to chase me around for twenty years before I was willing to listen to a goddamn word you said. This isn’t–” Duck’s thumbs brush against the soft skin of his partner’s thighs, and he chuckles softly. “How’d we end up here, y’know?”

Wet palms scoop his jaw as Minerva bends to kiss him, and the slow, deliberate motion feels like it’s carrying whatever heavy words he’s cut her off from speaking. She digs her nails along the divots of his spine and drags him whatever few inches closer she can manage.

“I wish to go to bed, Wayne Newton,” she murmurs, close enough that Duck can taste his name as it rolls off her lips. Her heels press against the small of his back, and her fingertips trace gentle patterns over his warm ears. A shudder rolls down his spine like so many forking bolts of lightning. “I would like to make this good while it lasts.”

The promise decidedly thrills his body, but Duck finds himself unsettled by the words themselves. With a steadying breath, he tilts his neck backwards so he can properly see her. He runs his fingers gently along her temple to trace the swirling line of tattoos that frame it, and Minerva’s eyes flicker open. She watches him carefully, and her grip loosens, as if she’s readying herself to jump out of his personal bubble. 

“Hey, what’s with that?” he asks, and against his wishes the words come out strangled. “You said you’d be with me until the end, right? Back when the world was tryin’ to kick it? I’m not gonna turn tail and run from you.”

“Your history doesn’t really back up that claim, Duck,” she says dryly, and a smile stutters and fails on her lips. 

“Okay, you know what, fair. But that’s a whole different– look. Destiny stuck you with me, and you wouldn’t lay off. Then destiny beefed it, and you stayed with me. And I went off to fuckin’ Brazil and you stayed with me. And I–” The words stick in his throat, and the terrified shove he gives them puts a crack into his voice. “–I love you, Minerva? You’ve stuck around despite everything, and there’s not– there’s nowhere I’m gonna go that I’m not gonna be lookin’ for you beside me.” 

Minerva seems to stop breathing for several minutes. Her eyes grow wide and glossy, as if the warmth of the spring has made a home there too. The water laps quietly around them, and its burbling is the only noise besides the rapid beating of Duck’s heart in his ears. 

Without warning, Minerva throws herself forward, her limbs cinching around him like steel cables and her face shoved into the crook of his neck. The force of it sends them both tumbling backwards, and as the pool becomes too deep for Duck’s feet, underwater. Their grip on each other comes loose in the melee, and Duck battles against the torrent of movement to resurface; Minerva finds purchase first, hauls him up with an arm, and then kisses him so fiercely that his legs give out.

Getting out of the springs and back to their room is, to put it mildly, a struggle.

The woodwork of the bed in their Lodge room is sturdier than Mama gave it credit for, though as someone out of practice and someone new to sex, they certainly put it through the wringer. The thrill of exploration keeps them awake far past the latest hours of the night and nearly into the sunrise, and Duck isn’t completely sure if it’s pure exhaustion or the comfort of Minerva’s body cuddled against his that finally proves sleep-inducing. Insistent knocking at the door is what finally rouses him hours later, though it takes a while to register the sound through the wall of blankets and warm limbs he’s buried in. 

“What time is it?” he groans, squinting at the warm light he’s now realized is cascading across the bedsheets and near directly into his eyes. 

“Like, noon? We’re doing brunch soon.”

“Aw, fuck me,” Duck sighs, lifting a lazy hand and scrubbing at his eyes. His skin feels gritty, and his biceps ache with delayed muscle soreness. Minerva’s nose nuzzles into the curve where his shoulder and neck meet, and the broad palm wrapped around his middle starts moving down the curve of his hips, casually retracing steps it took in hours prior. The gentle touch both tickles and nearly retriggers his enthusiasm. Duck winds his fingers with hers to tugs her hand back to his sternum; a grin stretches across his face as he murmurs, “Just an expression, Minnie.”

“Hmm,” she breathes, “Not your best goof.”

“We’ll be there in a sec, Aubrey,” Duck calls at the door, but takes his time kissing each of Minerva’s fingers and stretching out before bothering with the extreme effort of rising. He hops in the shower for just long enough to rinse away the dried sweat and residual scent of the springs; Minerva has only just sat up when he exits and starts hunting for clothes, looking less aware than he’s ever seen her. Her dark skin is flushed with the warmth of sleep, and there’s a gentle, pleased smile on her face that grows larger every time he comes within touching distance of her. She nearly pulls him back into the sheets when he finally gives in and reaches for a kiss, and the laugh that bubbles out of her throat is low and delighted;

They leave the room separately, both so Minerva can bathe and to better dissuade any of the other guests calling them out on their nighttime activities. There’s a milling crowd of folks digging into eggs and toast at the long hardwood table in the great room, and a sturdy cup of coffee is passed Duck’s way when he sits down amongst them. Aubrey steals fruit off his plate the moment it’s placed in front of him. Jake, on his other side, regales the table with a wild recount of some recent sports adventure, and there’s a dozen other snippets of conversation filling the air and available for sampling when Duck gets distracted. The chaos melds into a soft white noise that feels like home, and Duck sinks into it like he had the mattress and the hot springs, until he’s near drunk on the tenderness it builds in his gut. 

Minerva joins the table sometime during the haze; the kiss she presses to his cheek rouses him, and the abrupt wave of “awww”s that follows jostles Duck firmly into consciousness. He picks away at his bacon and tries to actively watch the mingling going on around him, at least until Stern skids the newspaper his way, claiming to have read it cover to cover.

“The comics are decent today,” he says to Duck, as stonefaced as ever, but clearly revealing his falsities. Barclay snorts from beside him and tosses a smile Duck’s way, confirming, “There actually is an article about the Park in there you might like.”

Duck flips through the newspaper for a bit, first to the comics in the back, and then through some of the shorter stories in the margins, only half paying attention. The writeup Barclay was referencing, an assessment of the local bobcat population the past few years running, is side by side with an editorial from the Cryptonomica, which playfully oversells the presence of a sasquatch in the woods. (The town of Kepler has long since come to an impasse concerning the sylvans; even those unfamiliar with which locals are sylphs in disguise are in on the game of playing cryptids up as easily-debunkable tourist-fodder.) He snorts over the commentary; Kirby seems to have taken a leaf out of Ned’s book of wordplay for his piece.

Mama skids by and dumps another handful of bacon onto Duck’s plate, and makes a light comment under her breath that he can’t hear well over the crowd but is sure is some kind of innuendo, given the sly wink she flashes him when he swivels to look at her. The smile on her face crinkles in genuine affection when she spots Minerva waving at her from the end of the table, her meticulously-kept notebook eagerly lifted over her head. Mama had proven personally interested in Minerva’s writing after her initial letter, and the two have established a sort of writer-editor relationship despite the usual distance; Thacker joins in periodically to give her pointers. Duck suspects they’re going to print a book by the time the year is out, and given the grapevine of connections they share, Duck will probably see it, if nowhere else, printed by Mama herself and stocked at the Cryptonomica. They fold up together over breakfast and the text, chattering, and Duck’s heart clenches fondly at the sight.

He’s discovered, in the slow building way that an avalanche tumbles down a mountainside, that he loves seeing Minerva excited. She’s taken to planting trees and learning languages and finding purpose beyond battle with absolute flourish. She’s discovered passions all her own, beyond martial arts and the day to day pattern of volunteer work she followed him to Brazil for, and Duck realizes, as he chews on his bacon strips, that he wants to keep feeding that joy. She may not always feel she deserves it, but he loves her enough to know she does.

Duck mindlessly flips through a few more pages of the newspaper, the words a blur in the emotional filter of his brain, when a small monochrome image in the corner catches his eye. The pristine lines of a mountain range look vibrant even in the colour-free still shot, with the rising sun cutting a beam straight through the peaks. The article describes the declining frosts in the arctic, and the alternate energies countries to the east are using in good consciousness of the melting sea ice. It talks about long trails to waterfalls, and thermal vents peeking up out of long swaths of tundra. About long shadows caused by a neverending evening.

Duck takes a slow sip of his coffee and considers. They have at least a few months to kill before their work permits will allow them back into South America. They’re moving into the time of year northern climates get their midnight sun. Minerva’s run through the guidebook to Brazil they got in the airport countless times – it’s dog-earred and scribbled in, lovingly marked with dates, and kept close on each walk they take into the woods. She’s passionate, if her excited jabbering with Mama is any more of an indication, about the Earth and its natural wonders, about its preservation and beauty. And she’s seen lots of Kepler.

Duck wouldn’t mind hiking in the cold, if she were with him.

“Hey, Minerva,” he calls, and she perks up from where she and Mama are bent over her book in an instant; he waves the folded newspaper in her direction, smile twitching on his face. “You up for a trip to Iceland?”

“A land of ice?”

“And volcanoes. Hot springs. Glaciers. Waterfalls that take hours to hike to.”

“What the fuck, Duck,” Aubrey squawks, glancing between the two of them, her voice loud in the sudden hush that he’s cut through the room. He can only see her in his peripheral vision – Minerva’s eyes are locked on his, bright with excitement. 

“Are there trees there, Wayne Newton?” she asks, and the volume of her voice grows as her smile does.

“Not really, nah. The redwood trees in California, though, those are pretty sharp. Or the– what’re those, the bonsais? Ber– the bor– banyons. Grow like vines over miles and share one big root. They’re in India, I think.”

“I– all of them,” Minerva says, braced to stand. Duck nods at her, sure the thrilled pounding of his heart has put an equally wild expression on his face. Mama snorts and gently tugs at Minerva’s arm, sighing, “First thing’s first, hon, let’s get this draft done. I’ve got you both here on a promise of at least a week-long visit, remember?”

The babbling conversation around him surges back in like the tide as she sits, laughter sparkling through it like cresting waves. The clinking of utensils on plates and hot drinks being poured fill the Lodge like music. Snippets of discussion about travel, inspired by this question, start popping up around him like snowdrops through the long freeze of winter, and Duck tucks a few of the place names away for future reference. He fidgets with the corner of the newspaper as he starts mentally listing things he’d like to show Minerva – things he’d always sort of wanted to see himself, only had lacked the motivation.

“She’s so good for you,” comes a whisper at his side. Aubrey nudges his arm and snatches another slice of apple off his plate. There’s something he’d almost call pride glimmering in her golden eyes.

“Always has been,” Duck hums, and grins into his coffee mug.


End file.
